Meg Kearney (Two Poems)
When he was dying my little brother
said cancer was “the sins of our mother”
visited upon him. What’s also true:
her heart was the stone rolled away from the tomb.
Laure-Anne Bosselaar: About My Birthday
when the last leaves let go, let go,
have all let go, & it’s almost winter again —
don’t remember my birthday
Video: White Grass
In Mongolia, 10 year old Munkhjargal dreams of following in her father’s footsteps as a horse trainer. Unfortunately, her entire way of life is threatened by an increasingly common phenomenon … Continue reading
Sally Bliumis-Dunn: Week One
She is fine like a ringlet of fiddlehead fern
before it unfurls in the summer forest
William Wenthe: Prophecy
In the predawn of Monday, I woke, dream-heavy
with a feeling of fate—like memory, but more
like remembering forward
Kathryn Levy: Three Poems
The geese are calling—this is
time to depart. They gather and sink and
soar toward somewhere.
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.
