Category: poems

This was written in 2018, which in hindsight seems like a golden dream compared to how things are going in the second administration. There’s something to be said for adverbs being cathartic, though. “Things got ugly suddenly embarrassingly forcefully,” indeed.

 

American Sonnet For The New Year
by Terrence Hughes

Things got terribly ugly incredibly quickly
Things got ugly embarrassingly quickly
actually Things got ugly unbelievably quickly
honestly Things got ugly seemingly infrequently
initially Things got ugly ironically usually
awfully carefully Things got ugly unsuccessfully
occasionally Things got ugly mostly painstakingly
quietly seemingly Things got ugly beautifully
infrequently Things got ugly sadly especially
frequently unfortunately Things got ugly
increasingly obviously Things got ugly suddenly
embarrassingly forcefully Things got really ugly
regularly truly quickly Things got really incredibly
ugly Things will get less ugly inevitably hopefully

I’ve posted this one in April three times since 2018, but I think it’s time to break it out early this year. I don’t know about you, but I could use someone reminding me spring is coming and not to give up. I could use someone commiserating over “whatever winter did to us, a return/ to the strange idea of continuous living despite the mess of us.”

Instructions on Not Giving Up
by Ada Limón

More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.

I found this last Friday and it’s like the writer was in my head. Happy 234th day of January, friends.

Still January
by Alix Klingenberg

Honestly, I’m sick of the internet
and doing the dishes. I’m over
having to eat every few hours
and the gnawing sense of doubt
that everything is just repeating
itself but in a slightly worse
configuration. I don’t want to
revamp my style or get a new rug.
I don’t want to scream my fears
into the screen or point with rising
urgency at the trees. My god, the
beloved trees and the bees and the
wolves and the children. It’s all
so horrific and I am not helping.
But I’m writing and maybe that’s
something. It is still January after all.

This is a short, recent one–but boy does it feel appropriate. Keep doing beautiful things, friends. That’s how we save us.

 

In 150 Characters or Less
by Nikita Gill

Everything is on fire, but everyone I love is doing beautiful things
and trying to make life worth living
and I know I don’t have to believe in everything,
but I believe in that.

Happy 2025! In 2024, we almost got lost in the mountains and it was my turn for health issues; glad to see it gone.

 

To the New Year
by W.S. Merwin

With what stillness at last
you appear in the valley
your first sunlight reaching down
to touch the tips of a few
high leaves that do not stir
as though they had not noticed
and did not know you at all
then the voice of a dove calls
from far away in itself
to the hush of the morning

so this is the sound of you
here and now whether or not
anyone hears it this is
where we have come with our age
our knowledge such as it is
and our hopes such as they are
invisible before us
untouched and still possible

This is a sweet one. What a wonderful way of saying, “I love you”–“I don’t ever really mind/ how much more/ you might keep speaking/ as it simply means/ I get to hear you/ speak for longer.”

 

To the Sea
by Anis Mojgani

Sometimes when you start to ramble
or rather when you feel you are starting to ramble
you will say Well, now I’m rambling
though I don’t think you ever are.
And if you ever are I don’t really care.
And not just because I and everyone really
at times falls into our own unspooling
—which really I think is a beautiful softness
of being human, trying to show someone else
the color of all our threads, wanting another to know
everything in us we are trying to show them—
but in the specific,
in the specific of you
here in this car that you are driving
and in which I am sitting beside you
with regards to you
and your specific mouth
parting to give way
to the specific sweetness that is
the water of your voice
tumbling forth—like I said
I don’t ever really mind
how much more
you might keep speaking
as it simply means
I get to hear you
speak for longer.
What was a stream
now a river.

 

You know I love a sonnet, and this one has some great parts–“we’re all peninsulas, I guess, joined to the mainland, part of the shore”–plus it feels appropriate for the week before Thanksgiving.

 

Sonnet from the Ephesians
by Barbara Crooker

Ephesians 1:16

I do not cease to give thanks, especially in November
even as we lose an hour of light, drawing
the curtains at 4:30 to keep out the cold. To remember
you are dust seems appropriate now. Crows are cawing

black elegies in the bare trees. Just past the Day of the Dead,
and I’m thankful for every friend who has blessed
my life, gold coins in a wooden chest. Who said
no man is an island? We’re all peninsulas, I guess,

joined to the mainland, part of the shore. We’re the sticks
in the bundle that can’t be broken. Even if
it doesn’t seem that way, the bickering of politics,
the blather on the nightly news. Maybe we speak in hieroglyphs,
unclear, always missing the mark? So let me be plain.
I’m grateful for the days of sun. I’m grateful for the rain.

We did yard work (planting iris) (not literally) and have been watching stupid movies to keep us from being tempted to look at the devil’s butthole. We can all still make a fist.

 

Making a Fist
by Naomi Shihab Nye

For the first time, on the road north of Tampico,
I felt the life sliding out of me,
a drum in the desert, harder and harder to hear.
I was seven, I lay in the car
watching palm trees swirl a sickening pattern past the glass. My stomach was a melon split wide inside my skin.

“How do you know if you are going to die?”
I begged my mother.
We had been traveling for days.
With strange confidence she answered,
“When you can no longer make a fist.”

Years later I smile to think of that journey,
the borders we must cross separately,
stamped with our unanswerable woes.
I who did not die, who am still living,
still lying in the backseat behind all my questions,
clenching and opening one small hand.

This is a nice one, especially if you wake up creaky and cranky and wanting to run away into the forest or just sleep all day like your cat.

 

To Be a Person
by Jane Hirshfield

To be a person is an untenable proposition.

Odd of proportion,
upright,
unbalanced of body, feeling, and mind.

Two predators’ eyes
face forward,
yet seem always to be trying to look back.

Unhooved, untaloned fingers
seem to grasp mostly grief and pain.
To create, too often, mostly grief and pain.

Some take,
in witnessed suffering, pleasure.
Some make, of witnessed suffering, beauty.

On the other side—
a creature capable of blushing,
who chooses to spin until dizzy,
likes what is shiny,
demands to stay awake even when sleepy.

Learns what is basic, what acid,
what are stomata, nuclei, jokes,
which birds are flightless.
Learns to play four-handed piano.
To play, when it is needed, one-handed piano.

Hums. Feeds strays.
Says, “All together now, on three.”

To be a person may be possible then, after all.

Or the question may be considered still at least open—
an unused drawer, a pair of waiting work-boots.