This great, much needed poem is a potent antidote to despair. I'm also using it to celebrate 12 years for Poem of the Month. According to Kaveh Akbar: "...bewilderment is at the core of every great poem, and in order to be bewildered, you have to be able to wonder." Is this, then, why [...]
I have long loved this poem, deeply touching without a hint of sorrow or regret. The title is a clue. May your memories, likewise, bring a soft fragrance to your heart. I come back to the cottage in Santa Monica Canyon where Andrée and I were poor and Happy together. Sometimes we Were hungry and [...]
Stafford's poem, sobering yet encouraging, is instructive. May your contemplation on his words touch the truth within your own being. If you don't know the kind of person I am and I don't know the kind of person you are a pattern that others made may prevail in the world and following the wrong god [...]
Cutting Loose For James Dickey Sometimes from sorrow, for no reason, you sing. For no reason, you accept the way of being lost, cutting loose from all else and electing a world where you go where you want to. Arbitrary, sound comes, a reminder that a steady center is holding all else. If you listen, [...]
This is what life does. It lets you walk up to the store to buy breakfast and the paper, on a stiff knee. It lets you choose the way you have your eggs, your coffee. Then it sits a fisherman down beside you at the counter who says, Last night, the channel was full of [...]
Love means to learn to look at yourself The way one looks at distant things For you are only one thing among many. And whoever sees that way heals his heart. Without knowing it, from various ills— A bird and a tree say to him: Friend. Then he wants to use himself and things So [...]
It takes courage to see beauty in a world spread deep and silent with interminable whiteness; and to keep on being awed by such uncommon splendor while trying to suppress a fundamental fear of being buried by it. But know it as it is: Beauty is everlasting. And winter's burial is not. Underneath cold winter [...]
You carry All the ingredients To turn your life into a nightmare- Don’t mix them! You have all the genius To build a swing in your backyard For God. That sounds Like a hell of a lot more fun. Let’s start laughing, drawing blueprints, Gathering our talented friends. I will help you With my divine [...]
Regret nothing. Not the cruel novels you read to the end just to find out who killed the cook, not the insipid movies that made you cry in the dark, in spite of your intelligence, your sophistication, not the lover you left quivering in a hotel parking lot, the one you beat to the punchline, [...]
We stop at the dry cleaners and the grocery store and the gas station and the green market and Hurry up honey, I say, hurry, as she runs along two or three steps behind me her blue jacket unzipped and her socks rolled down. Where do I want her to hurry to? To her grave? [...]