Susan Kelly-DeWitt: Psalm for Sunrise
Let the horses of dreaming ramble
home slowly from their sweet dark pastures.
Vox Populi: The Most Popular Posts of 2024
Thank you so much for helping to make Vox Populi a success in 2024. Since our founding 10 years ago as a newsletter for anti-fracking activists in Western Pennsylvania, we’ve accumulated more than 5,000,000 visits. We now have over 20,000 daily subscribers, about 35% outside the United States.
Video: Traveling Man, A Fable
A man meets a stranger in the park who has unusual powers.
Dennis Wilson Wise: The woman who revolutionized the fantasy genre is finally getting her due
Arthur C. Clarke called her the “most brilliant editor I ever encountered,” and Philip K. Dick said she was the “greatest editor since Maxwell Perkins.”
Chana Bloch: The New World
That’s the old country for you:
they ate with their hands, went hungry to bed,
slept in their stink. When pain knocked,
they opened the door.
Charles Reznikoff: The lamps are burning in the synagogue
Let us begin then humbly. Not by asking:
Who is This you pray to? Name Him;
define Him. For the answer is:
we do not name Him.
Once out of a savage fear, perhaps;
now out of knowledge—of our ignorance.
Cecilia Zavala: Pardon Me | Ending the Stigma That Harms Generations
When we reduce people to their convictions, we fail to see their humanity, their potential, and the harm this judgment causes not just to them but to their families.
Joseph Bathanti: High Mass
Winter Sundays,
when my father was on strike from steel,
he and my mother woke late,
then rose and prepared for high mass at Saints Peter and Paul.
Linda Parsons: Two Poems for Christmas
the light hasn’t always been easy to find—
haloed fires of childhood, my walk
on coals to the marriage pyre, parents
passed to flame and ash. All have sparked
the change ahead, all have lit the way.
Video: Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer
Grandma got run over by a reindeer
Walking home from our house Christmas Eve.
You can say there’s no such thing as Santa,
But as for me and Grandpa, we believe.
William Butler Yeats: The Magi
Now as at all times I can see in the mind’s eye,
In their stiff, painted clothes, the pale unsatisfied ones
Appear and disappear in the blue depths of the sky
Barbara Hamby: Ode to the ‘Messiah’, Thai Horror Movies, and Everything I Can’t Believe
When I decide to go to hear Handel’s Messiah in London
at the composer’s parish church, my husband says
he’d rather see a Thai horror movie, so we plan to meet later
at our favorite Moroccan lair
Ted Olson: Bob Dylan and the creative leap that transformed modern music
Sixty years ago, on Halloween Night 1964, a 23-year-old Dylan took the stage at New York City’s Philharmonic Hall. He had become a star within the niche genre of revivalist folk music. But by 1964 Dylan was building a much larger fanbase through performing and recording his own songs.
Baron Wormser: Striving with a God
In his best poems, something elemental is occurring – the clash between a lone life and the accrued verity of socialized watchfulness, the adages that are spoken without a second thought.
