Rachel Hadas: Humble Herb is Rival to Prozac
The little notebook, its pages an eye-ease greenish tint, with my staggering penciled captions labeling every blessed thing, each flower picked and pressed and taped down to the page, contains more than specimens of wildflowers from a Vermont meadow. It encloses the first summer I remember.
Rachel Hadas: What do the classics teach us about hope?
How do we weather this welter of bad news? How do we adapt?
Rachel Hadas: Lessons of Poetry
It is easier to lecture about the time and place of a book, the culture that produced it, the special historical or linguistic problems involved in it. It is harder…to face the book as a masterpiece and to help the student understand why it is a masterpiece….
Deborah DeNicola: The Death of Socrates
Even the guards listened in
as he taught his eternal lesson,
how to live like a moral human. Politics
back then—as now—rampant, wretched corruption,
a den of sociopaths in sheep’s clothing.
Rachel Hadas: Lyric Leap
lacuna, hiatus, sidebar,
sudden swerve, and you are far
along already toward surprise.
Rachel Hadas: Fingernails
Vanessa Redgrave thought whatever
separates life and death
is tiny as the sliver of a fingernail.
Rachel Hadas: The Mothers on the Wall
Young men stamping; clouds of dust their feet
Stir up; the gleaming weapons and the heat –
the women, poised and fearful, gazing down
as the squadron marches out of town
Rachel Hadas: Holding on to hope is hard, even with the pandemic’s end in sight – wisdom from poets through the ages
As we begin to glimpse what might be the beginning of the end of the pandemic, what does hope mean? It’s hard not to sense the presence of hope, but how do we think of it?
Rachel Hadas: Camilla
Our newborn granddaughter is named Camilla
from Aeneid VII’s warrior maiden,
the speedy runner, skimming over wheat,
scouring the ocean, keeping her feet dry.
Rachel Hadas: Screen and Dream
It wasn’t a dream, but the experience was dreamlike: across the computer screen, one day last week, a photograph of my father, sent by some well-meaning distant acquaintance, flashed without warning. In this black-and-white photo, Moses Hadas is sitting at the desk in his office…
Rachel Hadas: Trying to Get to School
But making my way from A to B
could not be managed easily.
Locked courtyard, blocked alleys, a high wall –
I had to cross or climb them all.
Rachel Hadas: Tiger Stripes
Caught in a beam of morning sun,
massive transitions are going on,
each nation and each generation
vying for who will take possession
of the Hotel Anxiety
Rachel Hadas: Shouldering
The students’ questions pound relentlessly.
Dream father, bird of omen, oh tell me –
the lost, the hungry, the abandoned – who
will take care of them?
Rachel Hadas: February 29, 2020
An extra day, an ordinary day,
predictable even in being extraordinary –
a bonus day in the old dispensation
we couldn’t guess was close to termination.
When did we start to sense the great subtraction?
