Linda Stern: At the Jetty
You climbed the jetty leading to the sea,
and I hung back to let you try your skill
at navigating life apart from me
though you were not so far I could not still
reach for you if you slipped and fell.
Rachel Hadas: Two Poems
One sight that sticks with me is the tail
of a blue phoenix soaring on a tile
from fifteenth-century Turkey. I couldn’t draw it
worth a damn, but gazed until I knew it.
I used the pencil in my hand to see.
Rachel Hadas: Pastorals
Its title is Red Comet, but the book itself is more like a long freight train, a slow train, a train crammed with information, a train that stops at every station, not to let anyone out but to take more in.
Rachel Hadas: Three Poems
Wait. Something I had never thought to see
again clanks forward from obscurity-
that creaky train I’d once been riding on,
a journey slow and grim.
Rachel Hadas: Why Trump’s rage defies historical and literary comparisons
As he has gained fame and power, Trump’s contemptuous rage at his opponents and his appetite for vengeance appear to have sharpened.
Rachel Hadas: ‘Each bears his own ghosts’
How the classics speak to these days of fear, anger and presidential candidates stalking the land
Rachel Hadas: ‘The immortal Gods alone have neither age nor death’: Wisdom from Greek tragedies for Joe Biden
It’s useful to think about the potential strengths, as well as the vulnerabilities, of age.
Rachel Hadas: Summer Nights and Days
So far the nights feel lonelier than the days.
In light, the living keep me company,
and memories of voices through the years.
Rachel Hadas: Ghost Guest
I sometimes think I recognize the face
of my own death. Knowing it is nearer
makes me feel it ought to be familiar,
a neutral guest I’ve seen somewhere before.
Rachel Hadas: Sustainable Systems
Hummingbirds in the bee balm. Scattered showers.
What rubric, what barometer, what headline?
Rachel Hadas: 460 Riverside Drive
What ghostly messenger
was rattling away unseen
on the other side of the door?
Rachel Hadas: Rainbow Parfait
…to be the archaeologist of one’s own past,
as if the sleeper, wakened now, alert,
was perched at the top of a trench
peering at something shining down below
Rachel Hadas: Ancient Greece had extreme polarization and civil strife too – how Thucydides can help us understand Jan. 6 and its aftermath
The insights and objectivity of a historian who lived nearly 2,500 years ago can bolster our understanding of the country’s current plight.
Rachel Hadas: Hypocrisy is beneath them – political figures in the Trump era don’t bother concealing their misdeeds
There seems to be no sense of shame or its cousin, guilt, in our time.
