we'll go winging

I woke up feeling like absolute garbage and it's going to be a very long day—our flight to New York for a week of theater and seeing friends (yay!) leaves Houston at 7pm and arrives at LGA a little before midnight. On the plus side, I also woke up thinking about this poem. So here's a little aspirational James Baldwin for today. I am hoping that the migraine meds work and the weather stays gorgeous and our travel is easy and painless, and I am also hoping for good things to come for all of us.

Let this be my summertime
Of azure sky and rolling sea,
And smiling clouds, and wind-kissed laughter,
And just myself entranced with thee.
And children playing in the glory
Of a carefree, youthful day,
And sunshine shining from the heavens,
And tears and sighing fled away.
Let this be my happiness
'Midst the earth's swift-flowing woe.
Let this be my only solace—
Just to know you love me so.
Just to know that we'll go winging,
Far above this earthy clime,
Hand in hand through laughing meadows.
Let this be my summertime.

—James Baldwin (1924-1987), "Paradise," from Magpie (Winter 1941).

come out of your houses drumming

We gotta get some protest poems up in here. Here's Rita Dove, who I adore and haven't posted in a few years.

Listen, no one signed up for this lullaby.
No bleeped sheep or rosebuds or twitching stars
will diminish the fear or save you from waking

into the same day you dreamed of leaving—
mockingbird on back order, morning bells
stuck on snooze—so you might as well

get up and at it, pestilence be damned.
Peril and risk having become relative,
I’ll try to couch this in positive terms:

Never! is the word of last resorts,
Always! the fanatic’s rallying cry.
To those inclined toward kindness, I say

Come out of your houses drumming. All others,
beware: I have discarded my smile but not my teeth.

—Rita Dove, "Incantation of the First Order," originally published in Poem-a-Day by the Academy of American Poets on October 18, 2021.

almost all elephant

If yesterday had not been grief poems day, I probably would have posted a poem about elephants. We went to see The Great Elephant Migration installation at Hermann Park, here in Houston, which was incredibly cool, and made me go on a little bit of a deep dive into poems about elephants. This is a little one—I seem to be posting a lot of short poems so far this year—and it's not even really about elephants, but I love it.

The room is
almost all
elephant.
Almost none
of it isn’t.
Pretty much
solid elephant.
So there’s no
room to talk
about it.

—Kay Ryan, "The Elephant In The Room." This poem may or may not have originally been published in 2005, but I got it from poetryisnotaluxury, and they got it from Resistance, Rebellion, Life: 50 Poems Now, edited by Amit Majmudar (Knopf, 2017). It's also possible that Kay Ryan has more than one poem with this title? Google is so fucking useless in the AI era. LET'S TALK ABOUT ELEPHANTS.

one big shadow and one small

I used to be very against prose poems, but in my more relaxed and slightly less pretentious old age (lol), I've read enough good ones that I've come around. Today is April 5, which isn't exactly my brother's yahrzeit, but is the anniversary of his memorial service, and the day—or one of the days, anyway—when I post a poem that has something to do with grief. So here is a really wonderful prose poem about grief.

I sit with my grief. I mother it. I hold its small, hot hand. I don't say, shhh. I don't say, it is okay. I wait until it is done having feelings. Then we stand and we go wash the dishes. We crack open bedroom doors, step over the creaks, and kiss the children. We are sore from this grief, like we've returned from a run, like we are training for a marathon. I'm with you all the way, says my grief, whispering, and then we splash our face with water and stretch, one big shadow and one small.

—Callista Buchen, "Taking Care," from Look Look Look (Black Lawrence Press, 2019)

gather blossoms under fire

This poem is honestly just the whole mood of National Poetry Month.

    for Mel

While love is unfashionable
let us live
unfashionably.
Seeing the world
a complex ball
in small hands;
love our blackest garment.
Let us be poor
in all but truth, and courage
handed down
by the old
spirits.
Let us be intimate with
ancestral ghosts
and music
of the undead.

While love is dangerous
let us walk bareheaded
beside the Great River.
Let us gather blossoms
under fire.

—Alice Walker, "While Love Is Unfashionable" from Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems, 1973, although I will fess up to reading it on the wonderful poetryisnotaluxury Instagram. They have a book coming out in May!

allowables

I've been rereading Nikki Giovanni, who died in December. Her writing—her poetry, of course, but also prose—is so wonderful, but one of my favorite things is how spare and simple some of her poems are, and how she can just absolutely punch you in the stomach with like five words. This one, from her 2013 hybrid collection Chasing Utopia (here's the title essay of the book at Poetry Foundation), absolutely haunts me.

I killed a spider
Not a murderous brown recluse
Nor even a black widow
And if the truth were told this
Was only a small
Sort of papery spider
Who should have run
When I picked up the book
But she didn't
And she scared me
And I smashed her

I don't think
I'm allowed

To kill something

Because I am

Frightened

—Nikki Giovanni (1943-2024), "Allowables," from Chasing Utopia: A Hybrid (William Morrow, 2013)

heartbreaking

My book club's book for March was Maya Deane's Wrath Goddess Sing, a trans and fantasy-ish retelling of the Iliad. As a long-standing irreverent classicist and fan of iddy fanfic, I enjoyed it a lot, although I did have some quibbles (overall, the fantasy and science fiction elements worked less well for me, and at a certain point I did kind of reach my limit on bonkers shit...lol whoops). But I also could not stop thinking about this poem during our book club meeting on Sunday—it's exactly right tonally, even if it's the Odyssey rather than the Iliad.

When I was a child looking
at my parents' lives, you know
what I thought? I thought
heartbreaking. Now I think
heartbreaking, but also
insane. Also
very funny.

—Louise Glück (1943-2023), "Telemachus' Detachment" from Meadowlands (Ecco Press, 1996).

love this spring

Good morning, and welcome to National Poetry Month. This means that I will be posting a poem (more or less) every day from now until April 30—life does intervene, and sometimes I skip days or post multiple poems, but I think that's part of the fun.

I started celebrating National Poetry Month in 2007, when I was 21; I turn 40 this year, and it's a little crazy to think that I've been doing this for almost half my life. According to my spreadsheet, I've posted approximately 500 poems. So much has changed in the time I've been doing this—for me, for the world—but poetry remains a constant for me, even while my tastes evolve and what I want from poetry shifts with the times we live in. I'm never exactly sure, going in, what any year's April will bring, but I hope you'll enjoy the journey with me. ♥

I always try to start with a spring poem for April 1 (even when the weather is terrible, as it currently is here in Houston), and I really love this one.

How can I love this spring
when it's pulling me
through my life faster
than any time before it?
When five separate dooms
are promised this decade
and here I am, just trying
to watch a bumblebee cling
to its first purple flower.
I cannot save this world.
But look how it's trying,
once again, to save me.

—James A. Pearson, "This Spring," from The Wilderness That Bears Your Name (Goat Trail Press, 2024). I first encountered this poem on Instagram, which has been a surprisingly excellent source of poetry for me over the last few years.