Doug Anderson: How it happens
God help me, I don’t know where I’m going.
We hold each other’s hand like children
finding our way home among the closing wolves.
Pam Uschuk: Like Obsidian’s Idea of Itself | Operation Uplift During the Pandemic
Each day my friend asks us to share
evidence of grace, photo trails of kids laughing,
prayer flags strung with petals
W.S. Merwin: Shore Birds
While I think of them they are growing rare
after the distances they have followed
all the way to the end for the first time
Lynn Levin: Buying Produce from the Marked-Down Cart
More than anything I hate waste
and yet how much
of my own life have I let go unused.
Emily Dickinson: Grief is a Mouse
Grief is a Thief—quick startled—
Pricks His Ear—report to hear
Of that Vast Dark—
That swept His Being—back—
David Huddle: Parable of My Family’s Artistic Impulses
My father, affectionately known
by his sons as Doodles, took up painting-by-the-numbers.
His vision of blue jays hung over the toilet to be
reckoned with by any urinating male.
Joan E. Bauer: W. Eugene Smith in Minamata, Japan 1971
Smith frames: Tomoko Uemura in Her Bath
The mother cradles Tomoko, her misshapen daughter.
Light through a dark window.
A post-modern pietà.
Jose Padua: Days of Being Wild
in the late middle
of my mortal days on earth
I am still wild in the heart
Edna St. Vincent Millay: The courage that my mother had
The courage that my mother had
Went with her, and is with her still:
Rock from New England quarried;
Now granite in a granite hill.
Michael Simms: A True Story of How I Almost Became a Rock and Roll God (with special appearance by Iron Butterfly)
So there I was, jumping up and down on a king-sized bed in an expensive hotel in Miami Beach, drinking rum straight from the bottle. And right beside me, jumping up and down, playing the air-guitar and blasting out his famous song In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, was Doug Ingle.
Justin Vicari: Encounters with Rimbaud
It’s found again.
What? — Eternity.
It’s the sea
making love to the sun.
Edna St. Vincent Millay: Oh, sleep forever in the Latmian cave
Oh, sleep forever in the Latmian cave,
Mortal Endymion, darling of the Moon!
Charlotte Mew: A Quoi Bon Dire
Seventeen years ago you said
Something that sounded like Good-bye;
And everybody thinks that you are dead,
But I.
Sam Hamill — To the Tune: Sands of the Washing Stream
The pear blossoms fade and die,
and I can’t keep them from falling.
