Jose Padua: These Years of Thinking Dangerously
When
the beautiful confusion of dreams becomes a stranger
to my waking hours I start to panic.
Toi Derricotte: My great teacher, Galway Kinnell, taught me: “Speak the unspeakable.”
My father taught me:
You have to break the bones
To get to the heart
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.
Barbara Crooker: Car Hop
I made seventy-five cents an hour, plus tips. All those shiny quarters. Some went down the throat of the jukebox—96 Tears, What Becomes of the Brokenhearted, Reach Out / I’ll Be There.
Toi Derricotte: My dad & sardines
i’ve made an altar called
The Altar for Healing the Father & Child
Dawn Potter: The Way We Live Now
a man solitary as a grieving
arrow types
a text to his daughter and
the text feathers into the ether
Ellery Akers: Four Prose Poems
Each of us is a struck bell that still reverberates. Walk down the street, and everyone who passes you is echoing inside.
Video: Heading South
In this poignant understated film, eight year old Chasuna travels from her home on the Mongolian grassland to visit her father who lives in the big city.
Elizabeth Savage: Five Sijos
His father’s death left a star-sized hole in Oklahoma. Alive,
mine is already all absence, out of breath with wishing to be
light like the deer he kills. Out of range, he seems small. Up close, smaller.
Claudia Boyd-Barrett, Hannah Hough: A Day in the Life of Parents Caring for a Child With Complex Medical Needs
As her parents see it, caring for Claire is part of the job of being parents and something they do gladly…
Pascale Petit: Hummer
The suitcase I found
on the shelf above his bed, with its jars
of mummified occupants, how I unwrapped
the photo curled around each hummingbird couple
like a sarcophagus
Michael Simms: Sometimes I Wake Early
Last night we took a friend for a walk along the edge
of our mountain. She looked out
over the city, the rivers, the sultry slopes
crowded with sumac and maple
and said So you know where you live
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer: Tonight, When I Turn Right on Ogden
By the time I turn onto the highway toward home
it is fifteen years ago
and my father is sitting in his favorite chair
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.
