Via Austin Kleon, this is by Ron Padgett from his book Big Cabin.

Something to remember.

It Is Not Your Job

by Caitlyn Siehl

when your little girl
asks you if she’s pretty
your heart will drop like a wineglass
on the hardwood floor
part of you will want to say
of course you are, don’t ever question it
and the other part
the part that is clawing at
you
will want to grab her by her shoulders
look straight into the wells of
her eyes until they echo back to you
and say
you do not have to be if you don’t want to
it is not your job
both will feel right
one will feel better
she will only understand the first
when she wants to cut her hair off
or wear her brother’s clothes
you will feel the words in your
mouth like marbles
you do not have to be pretty if you don’t want to
it is not your job

As I drive around town, I’ve been seeing fruit on the trees–first peaches, then pears and now apples. This is a dense one but it’s lovely.

A Sweetening All Around Me As It Falls
by Jane Hirshfield (1992)

Even generous August
only a child’s scribblings
on thick black paper, in smudgeable chalk –
even the ripening tomatoes, even the roses,
blowsy, losing their fragrance of black tea.
A winter light held this morning’s apples
as they fell, sweet, streaked by one touch
of the careless brush, appling to earth.
The seeds so deep inside they carry that cold.
Is this why some choose solitude, to rise
that small bit further, unencumbered by love of earth,
as the branches, lighter, kite now a little higher
on gold air? But the apples love the earth and falling,
lose themselves in it as much as they can at first touch
and then, with time and rain, at last completely:
to be that bone-like One that shines unleafed in
winter rain,
all black and glazed with not the pendant gold of
necklaced summer but the ice-color mirroring
starlight
when the earth is lonely and dark and knows nothing
of apples.
Seed-black of the paper, seed-black of the waiting
heart—
December’s shine, austere and fragile, carves the
visible tree.
But today, cut deep in last plums, in yellow pears,
in second flush of roses, in the warmth of an hour,
now late,
as drunk on heat as the girl who long ago vanished
into green trees,
fold that loneliness, one moment, two, love, back into
your arms.

This is from her book Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems 1991-1995 . “This is not somewhere else but here” is such a warning.

What Kind of Times Are These
Adrienne Rich

There’s a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill
and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows
near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted
who disappeared into those shadows.

I’ve walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don’t be fooled
this isn’t a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,
our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,
its own ways of making people disappear.

I won’t tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods
meeting the unmarked strip of light—
ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:
I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.

And I won’t tell you where it is, so why do I tell you
anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these
to have you listen at all, it’s necessary
to talk about trees.

This one, to me, is an analogy for living with grief. But the nice thing about poems is they can be all things to all people.

Things to Do in the Belly of the Whale

by Dan Albergotti

Suddenly it’s (almost) August and the heat that we missed for most of the spring has been here all month. My tomatoes are ripening in their patio pots so I thought of this poem:

Cherry Tomatoes
by Anne Higgins

The New Colossus
By Emma Lazarus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

***

Everything We Know About the Inhumane Conditions at Migrant Detention Camps.

Children Shouldn’t Be Dying at the Border.Here’s How You Can Help.

The details in this one just cut you to the heart.

And the are angry

by Fiona Wright

and they apologise in all their emails

and they remember where they put their keys

and they buy vegetables and milk

and they’re assumed to be on birth control

and they write perhaps and arguably and in a sense

and they are sympathetic

and they have internal ultrasounds

and they carry band-aids in their purses

and they break big notes before they go to dinner

and they match their underwear

and they make pots of tea

and they sit narrowly on trains and buses

and they pretend to talk on phones when they walk home

and they run on treadmills

and they don’t interrupt

and they don’t ask for exceptions

and their disposable razors come only in pink

and the doctors ask if they feel anxious

and they desire

and they are angry.