Category: poems

I’ve been missing Toby and my mom and how things were ten years ago. I love the title on this one, and the green motif that goes from fields to bruises to hope. Something to remember:  “Every wound closes. Repair comes with sweetness,/ Come spring. Every empire will fall:/ I must believe this.”

 

Greensickness
by Laurel Chen

after Gwendolyn Brooks

My wild grief didn’t know where to end.
Everywhere I looked: a field alive and unburied.
Whole swaths of green swallowed the light.
All around me, the field was growing. I grew out
My hair in every direction. Let the sun freckle my face.
Even in the greenest depths, I crouched
Towards the light. That summer, everything grew
So alive and so alone. A world hushed in green.
Wildest grief grew inside out.

I crawled to the field’s edge, bruises blooming
In every crevice of my palms.
I didn’t know I’d reached a shoreline till I felt it
There: A salt wind lifted
The hair from my neck.
At the edge of every green lies an ocean.
When I saw that blue, I knew then:
This world will end.

Grief is not the only geography I know.
Every wound closes. Repair comes with sweetness,
Come spring. Every empire will fall:
I must believe this. I felt it
Somewhere in the field: my ancestors
Murmuring Go home, go home—soon, soon.
No country wants me back anymore and I’m okay.

If grief is love with nowhere to go, then
Oh, I’ve loved so immensely.
That summer, everything I touched
Was green. All bruises will fade
From green and blue to skin.
Let me grow through this green
And not drown in it.
Let me be lawless and beloved,
Ungovernable and unafraid.
Let me be brave enough to live here.
Let me be precise in my actions.
Let me feel hurt.
I know I can heal.
Let me try again—again and again.

The opening three lines of this delighted me but this line is the clear winner of them all: “Not even moths in the spell of the flame/ Can want it to be warmer so much as I do!” Amen, Kenneth.

 

Desire For Spring
by Kenneth Koch

Calcium days, days when we feed our bones!
Iron days, which enrich our blood!
Saltwater days, which give us valuable iodine!
When will there be a perfectly ordinary spring day?
For my heart needs to be fed, not my urine
Or my brain, and I wish to leap to Pittsburgh
From Tuskegee, Indiana, if necessary, spreading like a flower
In the spring light, and growing like a silver stair.
Nothing else will satisfy me, not even death!
Not even broken life insurance policies, cancer, loss of health,
Ruined furniture, prostate disease, headaches, melancholia,
No, not even a ravaging wolf eating up my flesh!
I want spring, I want to turn like a mobile
In a new fresh air! I don’t want to hibernate
Between walls, between halls! I want to bear
My share of the anguish of being succinctly here!
Not even moths in the spell of the flame
Can want it to be warmer so much as I do!
Not even the pilot slipping into the great green sea
In flames can want less to be turned to an icicle!
Though admiring the icicle’s cunning, how shall I be satisfied
With artificial daisies and roses, and wax pears?
O breeze, my lovely, come in, that I mayn’t be stultified!
Dear coolness of heaven, come swiftly and sit in my chairs!

In the spirit of focusing on amaryllis buds instead of WW3, here’s a Philip Larkin poem, first posted back in 2016.  Clearly it still speaks to me–I think it’s that first line, figuring out the syntax and then saying, “Oh yeah, that is what the light is doing these days.”

 

Coming
by Philip Larkin

On longer evenings,
Light, chill and yellow,
Bathes the serene
Foreheads of houses.
A thrush sings,
Laurel-surrounded
In the deep bare garden,
Its fresh-peeled voice
Astonishing the brickwork.
It will be spring soon,
It will be spring soon —
And I, whose childhood
Is a forgotten boredom,
Feel like a child
Who comes on a scene
Of adult reconciling,
And can understand nothing
But the unusual laughter,
And starts to be happy.

Everything is bad but we have friends. If you need to, come over. (We’ll show you the basement!)

 

We Have Enough Friends
by Lena Oleanderson

Come over. The doors are open,
my flat’s a mess and
so is my heart
but the doors are always open.
Come over. I will make soup,
probably from frozen but
the important thing is
we will both eat.

You don’t have to be dying,
but if you are,
or feel like you are,
or if living’s been hard,
call me, and I will show up.
It doesn’t have to be that bad,
it doesn’t have to be bad at all,
but if it is, please call.

Do you want me to do the groceries?
Do you want me to mop the floors?
Do you need to be held;
you don’t have to be dying to be held.
If you want me to be there, I want to.

I’m on the bathroom floor again,
and breathing is hard,
and eating’s been hard, and sleeping,
the world is a laden thing
rolling around on my chest lately.
Just being alive is heavy tonight,
but we have enough dead friends.
Come over.

Things are bad in America, friends, but we’re still here. This is from a collection di Prima started writing in 1968, which is really comforting for me (in a “We survived that” sense, not that they’re still applicable even today.)  You can find most of the poems as a PDF in a few places.

 

REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #100
REALITY IS NO OBSTACLE
by Diane di Prima

refuse to obey
refuse to die
refuse to sleep
refuse to turn away
refuse to close your eyes
refuse to shut your ears
refuse silence when you can still sing
refuse discourse in lieu of embracement
come to no end that is not
a Beginning

 

As the tides of STUFF move from floor to floor over here, I’m finding boxes and drawers I didn’t go through during the Great Organization of 2025. So the pile of things to donate is growing, which reminded me of this poem I saw in the Ordinary Plots newsletter. As I learned, “Samuel Cheney is an ex-Mormon poet from Centerville, Utah, who now lives in Baltimore. He is the winner of a Pushcart Prize, and his debut manuscript, BELIEVERS, was a finalist for the 2024 National Poetry Series.”

 

Deseret Industries Thrift
by Samuel Cheney

Promise yourself
you’re looking
for nothing.
Praise the abandoned

Diet Coke can,
the squealing
quivering carts’ wheels,
the aproned associates

who estimate costs
where tags have been
ripped off
out of hope.

The glass case of valuables:

Stockton All-Star card
framed in black mat.

From an ’80s Okinawa mission,
a Pentax.

Talmage’s Jesus the Christ, bound
in napped leather.

This country
affords so little.
These automatic doors
open and condone you.

Who here isn’t untested,
one touch before
broken, selling for
something fair.

I don’t want to live
my life
like a pair
of skis. Make me

of wool. Bring me out
every year—
pass me on—
bury me with someone.

The holidays are over, the birthdays are over, and now it’s back to work in the gloomy winter. What can be done? Find those “joys far more ordinary” (and turn on your SAD Lamps).

Midwinter Poem
by Victoria Adukwei Bulley

Oh intervals of light in untold sunless days
hardbacked by dusk, there is no guidebook
for the years within a year called winter.
Season of the see-it-through, the out-of-office,
the batten-down. Monied guarantor of the sad
and SAD Lamps alike — hemispheric accidents, all,
of our axial tilt. If not by flying south, what else to do
but stay and bear it? How else to survive, if not by light,
then by joys far more ordinary, unremarkable perhaps,
but good as any that warm the dark days of our lives.

I’m a sucker for poems related to Christmas (and for carols too; this is accurate). I like how this one rambles and is sad but also hopeful–the classic December mix of feelings.

 

Advent
by Heather Christle

It’s hopeless, the stars, the books
about stars, they can’t help themselves
and how could you not love them for it
here in the new week with animals
burying food and everything outlined
in cold and even friends, it’s hopeless,
this mess, this season, all that
is lost and tickets and strangers,
what can I say, only sitting here
on this dark bench waiting for what
I don’t know, I want this world
to remain with me, this holy tumult,
which does not know it loves me
and you, friends, spectacular driveways,
an orange, the vanishing year.

This is a tender one: “I think about them, in their hollows, in forest and field, millions / Of tiny hearts racing and parents trying to cover their nestlings.”

You Too
by John Jeremiah Sullivan

I saw a YouTube video of an owl inside its nest during a storm.
The scientists had installed a hidden camera in its little hollow.
The clip surprised me, in that the owl appeared very frightened.
I hadn’t pictured birds as being scared of thunder and lightning.
They’re at one with nature, I figured. It could never shock them.
But this one staggered backward until its back ran into the wall.
It moved just the way someone will when an earthquake begins,
Or after walking into a hallway only to find a wild animal there.
Ever since seeing that clip, I do not experience storms the same.
Now when the lightning flashes white, and I wait for the boom,
I think about them, in their hollows, in forest and field, millions
Of tiny hearts racing and parents trying to cover their nestlings.
The landscape is full of that feeling. An owl in a video looks up.
Its eyes are big and round, not certain what any of this portends,
And follow the sound of the wind-driven rain outside the room.