Joan E. Bauer: The Vernacular Landscape
I love how he values words & waits until they grow
hot in his imagination, then OOF FLASH SPAM
Hart Crane: At Melville’s Tomb
Often beneath the wave, wide from this ledge
The dice of drowned men’s bones he saw bequeath
An embassy. Their numbers as he watched,
Beat on the dusty shore and were obscured.
Rachel Hadas: ‘The immortal Gods alone have neither age nor death’: Wisdom from Greek tragedies for Joe Biden
It’s useful to think about the potential strengths, as well as the vulnerabilities, of age.
James Crews: Berrypicking On the Dexter Trail
I see how the bulldozers that disfigured
this land, and removed the mossy,
old-growth maples, also made room
for black raspberry bushes to fill out
and fruit, ripeness reaching for my hands.
Heather Davis: Spare No Detail | Three Poems about Gaza
Imagine a smart phone with crystal clear transmission
set in every corner of Auschwitz in 1943. Surely, we
would have saved them, every one.
Jim Minick: To Spoon
To spoon is to slip into sleep
and the same soft, slow breath,
to listen to the rain
with one ear.
Mandy Fessenden-Brauer: Two Poems About the Orchards of Gaza
Although it’s one of the most densely populated areas in the world, Gaza’s always had a distinct rural quality. Everyone grew something, some in agricultural areas away from their homes. Even in the very crowded refugee camps there were small atriums with a tree and potted plants.
Laure-Anne Bosselaar: The Worlds in this World
Elsewhere, somewhere, a tide recedes,
incense is lit, an infant sucks from a nipple,
a grenade shrieks, a man buys his first cane.
Patricia Spears Jones: Discontented Summer
Every picture tells a story but which story and who makes the picture
Edward Harkness: Left-handed Set Shot
Poems, stories, travel tales: he taught intelligence.
His art was life, how to dance with it, how to play,
how to take or not take the shot.
Angele Ellis: “I lived in the dark” | In Grace Notes, Naomi Shihab Nye finds the music in poems about families and the incidents and accidents of personal history
All poetry begins in song, as Naomi Shihab Nye reminds the reader, starting with the title of her latest collection, 117 mostly brief free verse poems that like songs, are both accessible and mysterious.
Gerard Manley Hopkins: Pied Beauty
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
Jose Padua: A Poem for Jimi Hendrix and All the Superheroes of My Youth Who Lacked the Power to Live Forever
what was really interesting
wasn’t what they could do
but what they couldn’t do
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer: Meadow
As if, with open palms,
I could pull this beauty
inside me and carry it with me
until I give it to you—
