Vox Populi: The 15 most popular posts of 2022
During 2022, Vox Populi published 737 posts including poetry, essays and short films. Here are the fifteen most visited.
Maura Ives: How an American magazine helped launch one of Britain’s favorite Christmas carols
Christina Rossetti’s ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’ didn’t begin life as a song, but being set to music helped it find fame.
Toi Derricotte | Christmas Eve: My Mother Dressing
My mother was not impressed with her beauty;
once a year she put it on like a costume
David Baker: Holiday Wish
a little peace, a touch of ease, another day
come round with steady light
Michelle Bitting: Now at Holiday Time I Think About the Moment I Heard You Passed On
a stone’s throw from lots
where talented Sharon Tate expired and Jim Morrison
fluttered psychedelic, fiery birds rising from the boulevard
of broken wings
Wally Swist: Honoring the Moment
The preparation is essential
to the beginning of the everyday
Barbara Crooker: Star of Wonder, Star of Light
It’s Christmas, the year before the accident, when the earth
still seemed fixed. My husband and children are hanging
lights on the big pine tree
Lasse Söderberg: A part of America
They are watching us in their field glasses.
We are watching them in our field glasses.
Danusha Laméris: Thinking
Don’t you wish they would stop, all the thoughts
swirling around in your head, bees in a hive, dancers
tapping their way across the stage?
Arlene Weiner: While I live
While I live, let me pour as through a sieve
the mixed and muddied waters of my loves,
hold the gold and let the silt go.
Michael Simms: The Pecan Grove
he taught me
the geometry of carpentry
the mysteries
of plumbing, told me
dirty jokes
D.H. Lawrence: Terra Incognita
and grapes, and ghouls, and ghosts and green moonlight
and ruddy-orange limbs stirring the limbo
of the unknown air
Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum: Heaven-Fire
The boy is not my blood
Though “Son” is the only name I have for “He-
Who-Will-Dance-To-Just-About-Anything,”
Elizabeth Mercurio: Three Poems
Years have passed
since I last tried to take my life.
