Robert Frost: The Wood-Pile
And it was older sure than this year’s cutting,
Or even last year’s or the year’s before.
The wood was gray and the bark warping off it
And the pile somewhat sunken.
Keith Flynn: Granularities
Each organ seems like a streetlight in a neighborhood
viewed from the mountaintop at midnight,
going out slowly one by one. “It’s all downhill from
here, Son,” he tells me, “‘til I hit the bottom.”
Doug Anderson: Charon
The boat came by my bed, Charon poling through the murk. Get in, He said, and so we drifted through a night of broken trees and burning cars.
Katie Kapurch: Why ‘Barbie’ and ‘The Little Mermaid’ made 2023 the dead girl summer
These dead girls offer insights about living. Embracing death’s inevitability brings some freedom, as well as access to truths about time and the natural world.
Laure-Anne Bosselaar: When the Bed is Made
How mothers, lovers, nurses & hotel maids,
backs aching, have bent over beds for that last
swift tidying.
Video: Alua Arthur | Why thinking about death helps you live a better life
What must I do to be at peace with myself so that I may live presently and die gracefully?
Emily Dickinson: My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun (764)
My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun –
In Corners – till a Day
The Owner passed – identified –
And carried Me away –
Baron Wormser: On Moral Grounds
One can be humbled into silence and one can be humbled into words. Or one can feel both—the silence that underlies the words.
Walt Whitman: On the Beach at Night
Something there is more immortal even than the stars,
(Many the burials, many the days and nights, passing away,)
Something that shall endure longer even than lustrous Jupiter
Longer than sun or any revolving satellite,
Or the radiant sisters the Pleiades.
Connie Post: Estrangement
you watch a burning city
from far away
and notice a pigeon flying towards you
gaining speed
pulling the sky’s edges with it
Laure-Anne Bosselaar: At the end of the Breakwater
Let the day open so wholly
to light.
Diana Raab: Lessons from My Grandmother
I was ten years old the morning I found my grandmother dead.
Michael Simms: Prospero needs a little nap
Vox Populi will endure, albeit at a slower pace.
David Hassler: Intensive Care
Children under the age of fourteen weren’t allowed in the ICU. I was eleven, and my brother was thirteen, but no nurse or doctor was going to stop us from seeing our mother.
