Joy Gaines-Friedler: Happiness
What’s between them is a mystery.
The way the leaves that flag in the wind
know to be leaves, or the tree knows to grow them.
Majid Naficy: Khomeini’s Visit
My father never told us
That Khomeini had visited him
For medical treatment many years ago
Kari Gunter Seymour: Planting By the Signs
I hear my grandmother’s voice, a divination,
Thick rolls the mist, that smokes and falls in dew.
Paul Christensen: Summer’s First Visitors
It’s summer and the gods are playing tug of war with the wind and the sun. Some days are dead-weighted with humid air that clings to our our faces like … Continue reading
Michael Gregory: Two Songs (audio and text)
I went to the drugstore and I looked inside
Saw my good gal had upped and died
Hung my head down and I cried
Don’t want no more war
Meg Pokrass: Moments with Crochet Hooks
Back then she and her mother waited for the phone to ring, for money to plump itself up and walk through their door. Moments passed with yarn and crochet hooks.
H.D.: Evening
shadow seeks shadow,
then both leaf
and leaf-shadow are lost
Naomi Shihab Nye, Michael Simms & Friends: Poets for the People of Gaza
Naomi Shihab Nye, the current Young People’s Poet Laureate, and poet Michael Simms gather international poets to share works that navigate themes of identity, displacement, and home in Gaza.
Riad Saleh Hussein: Like a Star in the Sky, Like a Buck in the Jungle
Here is a rock and two eyes
Here is a moon, there is a goose
And still there are more things I could not see
Rick Campbell: Another List of Things I Have Attended to Sloppily
The garden gates, once my pride, now
slanted, ajar, hinges rusted and failing.
The rails of Della’s tree house
that somehow escaped their nails.
Elizabeth Romero: On the Corner
If
(by some miracle)
We could be both dead and alive
Rise from the blood and ashes
Gauzy like movie ghosts
Richard Wilbur: Love Calls Us to the Things of This World
Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,
Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam
And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.
Michael Simms: Only You
I woke this morning remembering the room we had in Paris which looked out on the Seine.
Rafael Cadenas: Failure
How much I owe you!
You elevated me to a new rank washing me with a rough sponge, throwing me on to
my true battlefield, assigning me the weapons left behind by victory.
