Vox Populi

A curated webspace for Poetry, Politics, and Nature with over 6,000,000 visitors since 2014 and over 9,000 archived posts.

Barbara Hamby: Ode on My Mother’s Handwriting

Her a’s are like small rolls warm from the oven, yeasty,
fragrant, one identical to the other, molded
by a master baker, serious about her craft, but comical, too,
smudge of flour on her sharp nose

May 11, 2025 · 21 Comments

Fleur Adcock: Happy Ending

After they had not made love
she pulled the sheet up over her eyes
until he was buttoning his shirt:
not shyness for their bodies – those
they had willingly displayed – but a frail
endeavor to apologise.

May 2, 2025 · 11 Comments

Laure-Anne Bosselaar: Nostalgia

Nostalgias we share with friends
around a good table, nodding yes, yes, to our
glad sadnesses as we bring back a taste, a kiss,
that one song we will never forget.

April 27, 2025 · 33 Comments

George Herbert: Love (III)

Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-ey’d Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
If I lack’d anything.

April 20, 2025 · 13 Comments

Louise Bogan: The Changed Woman

The cracked glass fuses at a touch,
The wound heals over, and is set
In the whole flesh, and is not much
Quite to remember or forget.

March 28, 2025 · 7 Comments

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.

February 16, 2025 · 2 Comments

Video: Love in the Time of Migration

Ronny and Suly are in love. The only problem is that Ronny is in the US, while Suly is in Guatemala.

February 13, 2025 · 5 Comments

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.

February 8, 2025 · 9 Comments

Elizabeth Jacobson: Love, I Am

what am I
to myself:
two feet on
some land
when upright

January 15, 2025 · 11 Comments

Video: Do You Want To Go Down This Way, Or Go Back The Way We Came?

A new film elegy by Bryan Konefsky that uses the lens of loss and grief to explore intersections between memory and artifact.

January 5, 2025 · 5 Comments

Michael Simms: Jubilate

Now I shall praise our dog Josie
the bodhisattva of our household
the perfect embodiment
of devotion, always present
in spontaneous awe

December 14, 2024 · 40 Comments

William Shakespeare: Sonnets 73 & 74

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.

December 6, 2024 · 18 Comments

Andrew Reginald Hairston: Sweet Potato Pie

Having gone public with your bisexuality the month prior — and blocking your parents and sister at the same time — the memories would have to suffice

November 27, 2024 · 6 Comments

Video: Naomi Shihab Nye reads her poem Gate A-4

I heard an announcement:
“If anyone in the vicinity of Gate A-4 understands any Arabic, please
come to the gate immediately.”

November 24, 2024 · 18 Comments

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