Helge Torvund: The Hand
This poem contains
all the poems I have felt
moving inside me
but never wrote down
Alexis Rhone Fancher: Out of Order
Promise me, my sister says. That you’ll be there if something happens to me. I know she worries about the fate of her children if she becomes injured, succumbs to a virus or is killed in a crash. Anything’s possible, she says. For better or worse, her sperm donor’s out of the picture.
Kathleen O’Toole: A dimmer hope
First crack of crimson
in the January morning sky
engenders such an ache, not
only for the sun’s escape
from cloud block, but ours
from winter’s grip.
Video: Grace
Sixteen-year-old Grace prepares for her baptism in the 1950’s South. When she learns she must repent before the ritual, Grace contemplates her budding romantic feelings toward her best friend, Louise.
Robinson Jeffers: Love the Wild Swan
I hate my verses, every line, every word.
Oh pale and brittle pencils ever to try
One grass-blade’s curve, or the throat of one bird
That clings to twig, ruffled against white sky.
W.H. Auden: Lullaby
Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer: You Belong
It’s not true our hearts are our own—
they’re symbiotic as meadows in spring.
The heart exists for who grows in it.
Alison Luterman: Snowy Plover
Their wild wheelings trace the shape
of wonder and grief moving inside us,
pewter, then platinum.
It goes away like that; it comes back.
It carves a black, moving river in the air.
Chard deNiord: The Hawk
I was gazing out this morning from my perch in Bedford,
Virginia when I heard the screech of a red-
tailed hawk in the deep, cerulean sky
above a Blue Ridge mountain in which the other-
wise perfect silence was musical
Charles Davidson: Resistance
The time has come for massive nonviolent resistance.
Video: Parkinson’s Together
For a long time, I had been wanting to create a series of portraits of my husband, who is living with Parkinson’s disease. Portraits where I honor Hal as a person – his strength and his vulnerability. And portraits where I express how it feels for me to be both a witness and a care partner in this.
Sydney Lea: Hush
Does it make any sense to say I heard dead silence? No matter. I’ll simply declare that I’ve never known such quiet in the sixty years I’ve roamed these woods and hills.
Michael Simms: Thinking of the Rapture at Castriota Metals and Recycling
frying pans fence posts
whole bags of rusty nails
even shoes hanging by
the metal aglets
at the tips of their laces
St. John of the Cross: Dark Night of the Soul (English and Spanish)
That light guided me
More surely than the noonday sun
To the place where He was waiting for me
