yes

And to close out National Poetry Month, 2026:

It could happen any time, tornado,
earthquake, Armageddon. It could happen.
Or sunshine, love, salvation.

It could, you know. That's why we wake
and look out—no guarantees
in this life.

But some bonuses, like morning,
like right now, like noon,
like evening.

—William Stafford (1914-1993), "Yes," from The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems (Graywolf, 1999).

As always, thanks for reading with me. See you next year. ♥

in this long season

This is my April 29 poem, because yesterday was a bad migraine day and I'm a day behind. That means two poems on this, the last day of April and poetry month (A SAD DAY), but I am posting one now and one later instead of posting them together. So here, per request of K, is Wendell Berry.

Shall we do without hope? Some days
there will be none. But now
to the dry and dead woods floor
they come again, the first
flowers of the year, the assembly
of the faithful, the beautiful,
wholly given to being.
And in this long season
of machines and mechanical will
there have been small human acts
of compassion, acts of care, work
flowerlike in selfless loveliness.
Leaving hope to the dark
and to a better day,
receive these beauties freely
given, and give thanks.

—Wendell Berry, "Shall we do without hope?" 2007. I got this poem from poetryisnotaluxury, but it's actually an excerpt from poem II in 2007 of "Sabbaths: 2005-2008" in Wendell Berry, Leavings (Counterpoint, 2010). Berry is highly excerptible, in my opinion, and this very much stands on its own. Also I love it, obviously.

swept our hearts clean

A little devotional-ish poetry for Easter Monday. I love Joy Harjo.

To pray you open your whole self
To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon
To one whole voice that is you.
And know there is more
That you can't see, can't hear;
Can't know except in moments
Steadily growing, and in languages
That aren’t always sound but other
Circles of motion.
Like eagle that Sunday morning
Over Salt River. Circled in blue sky
In wind, swept our hearts clean
With sacred wings.
We see you, see ourselves and know
That we must take the utmost care
And kindness in all things.
Breathe in, knowing we are made of
All this, and breathe, knowing
We are truly blessed because we
Were born, and die soon within a
True circle of motion,
Like eagle rounding out the morning
Inside us.
We pray that it will be done
In beauty.
In beauty.

—Joy Harjo, "Eagle Poem," from In Mad Love and War (Wesleyan University Press, 1990), but in my case from a very lovely signed copy of Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light: 50 Poems for 50 Years (Norton, 2023).

taste each moment

For my birthday, mistresscurvy got me a copy of Marge Piercy's What Are Big Girls Made Of?, which I did not already own (always a little bit of a risk with buying me poetry books, but please feel free to buy me poetry books literally any time, I love poetry books), although I knew some of the poems already from the big Piercy collection I did already own. When I re-encountered this poem at the end of the book, I was honestly shocked to realize I had not posted it before. I had to check a couple of times to make sure, because I really, really love this poem.

This is the blessing for rain after drought:
Come down, wash the air so it shimmers,
a perfumed shawl of lavender chiffon.
Let the parched leaves suckle and swell.
Enter my skin; wash me for the little
chrysalis of sleep rocked in your plashing.
In the morning the world is peeled to shining.

This is the blessing for sun after long rain:
Now everything shakes itself free and rises.
The trees are bright as pushcart ices.
Every last lily opens its satin thighs.
The bees dance and roll in pollen
and the cardinal at the top of the pine
sings at full throttle, fountaining.

This is the blessing for a ripe peach:
This is luck made round. Frost can nip
the blossom, kill the bee. It can drop,
a hard green useless nut. Brown fungus,
the burrowing worm that coils in rot can
blemish it and wind crush it on the ground.
Yet this peach fills my mouth with juicy sun.

This is the blessing for the first garden tomato:
Those green boxes of tasteless acid the store
sells in January, those red things with the savor
of wet chalk, they mock your fragrant name.
How fat and sweet you are weighing down my palm,
warm as the flank of a cow in the sun.
You are the savor of summer in a thin red skin.

This is the blessing for a political victory:
Although I shall not forget that things
work in increments and epicycles and sometime
leaps that half the time fall back down,
let's not relinquish dancing while the music
fits into our hips and bounces our heels.
We must never forget, pleasure is real as pain.

The blessing for the return of a favorite cat,
the blessing for love returned, for friends'
return, for money received unexpected,
the blessing for the rising of the bread,
the sun, the oppressed. I am not sentimental
about old men mumbling the Hebrew by rote
with no more feeling than one says gesundheit.

But the discipline of blessings is to taste
each moment, the bitter, the sour, the sweet
and the salty, and be glad for what does not
hurt. The art is in compressing attention
to each little and big blossom of the tree
of life, to let the tongue sing each fruit,
its savor, its aroma and its use.

Attention is love, what we must give
children, mothers, fathers, pets,
our friends, the news, the woes of others.
What we want to change we curse and then
pick up a tool. Bless whatever you can
with eyes and hands and tongue. If you
can't bless it, get ready to make it new.

—Marge Piercy, "The art of blessing the day," from What Are Big Girls Made Of?, 1997, although my edition is Knopf, 2018.

counter, original, spare, strange

Sometimes, when I'm not sure what poem I'm in the mood for and don't have a plan for the day, I go back through my spreadsheet in search of inspiration and realize that, although I have posted almost all of my favorite Gerard Manley Hopkins poems, there are some I have missed.

Glory be to God for dappled things –
     For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
          For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
     Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;

          And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
     Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
          With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
                                   Praise him.

—Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889), "Pied Beauty," Summer 1877. The note on this poem in my edition of Selected Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Dover, 2011, ed. Bob Blaisdell) says, "Curtal Sonnet: sprung paeonic rhythm," because Hopkins is, as always, baller.

begin

It's my birthday! I turn thirty-five today, not completely in isolation: I'm going out for a long walk this afternoon to pick up the lemon meringue pie I ordered from a local family-owned bakery that's still open for pick-up orders, and I have plans for a small, low-key party on zoom tonight with some friends and family. I read some fic this morning, and then a bunch of poetry, and although it's fairly overcast, it's also fairly warm, and the sun is peaking out through the clouds. There are still a lot of things worth celebrating.

For almost all of the last thirteen years, I've posted poems by either Auden or Donne—two of my very favorite, best beloved, and remarkably prolific poets—on my birthday. I haven't run out of either Auden or Donne poems (as witness the fact that I already posted a Donne poem earlier this month), but I think it's time to change the tradition. Starting this year, I will be posting poems on my birthday by new-to-me poets, or at least by poets I haven't posted before. We'll see how long this plan lasts (you never know), but let's give it a try. Here's Linda Pastan:

For Anna

Let every tree
burst into blossom
whatever the season.
Let the snow melt
mild as milk
and the new rain wash
the gutters clean
of last year's
prophecies.
Let the guns sweep out
their chambers
and the criminals doze
dreaming themselves
back to infancy.
Let the sailors throw
their crisp white caps
as high as they can
which like so many doves
will return to the ark
with lilacs.
Let the frogs turn
into princes,
the princes to frogs.
Let the madrigals,
let the musical croakings
begin.

—Linda Pastan (b. 1932), "Proclamation at a Birth" from Carnival Evening, 1998, and posted on The Writer's Almanac on April 14, 2012.

the gauzy edge of paradise

I know I said I was finishing the devotional poetry with Herbert, but then I went and read some Anne Sexton. Does this count as devotional poetry? Maybe. I love this poem so much. Full spoilers, but there are flying nuns.

I am surprised to see
that the ocean is still going on.
Now I am going back
and I have ripped my hand
from your hand as I said I would
and I have made it this far
as I said I would
and I am on the top deck now
holding my wallet, my cigarettes
and my car keys
at 2 o'clock on a Tuesday
in August of 1960.

Dearest,
although everything has happened,
nothing has happened.
The sea is very old.
The sea is the face of Mary,
without miracles or rage
or unusual hope,
grown rough and wrinkled
with incurable age.

Still,
I have eyes.
These are my eyes:
the orange letters that spell
ORIENT on the life preserver
that hangs by my knees;
the cement lifeboat that wears
its dirty canvas coat;
the faded sign that sits on its shelf
saying KEEP OFF.
Oh, all right, I say,
I'll save myself.

Over my right shoulder
I see four nuns
who sit like a bridge club,
their faces poked out
from under their habits,
as good as good babies who
have sunk into their carriages.
Without discrimination
the wind pulls the skirts
of their arms.
Almost undressed,
I see what remains:
that holy wrist,
that ankle,
that chain.

Oh God,
although I am very sad,
could you please
let these four nuns
loosen from their leather boots
and their wooden chairs
to rise out
over this greasy deck,
out over this iron rail,
nodding their pink heads to one side,
flying four abreast
in the old-fashioned side stroke;
each mouth open and round,
breathing together
as fish do,
singing without sound.

Dearest,
see how my dark girls sally forth,
over the passing lighthouse of Plum Gut,
its shell as rusty
as a camp dish,
as fragile as a pagoda
on a stone;
out over the little lighthouse
that warns me of drowning winds
that rub over its blind bottom
and its blue cover;
winds that will take the toes
and the ears of the rider
or the lover.

There go my dark girls,
their dresses puff
in the leeward air.
Oh, they are lighter than flying dogs
or the breath of dolphins;
each mouth opens gratefully,
wider than a milk cup.
My dark girls sing for this.
They are going up.
See them rise
on black wings, drinking
the sky, without smiles
or hands
or shoes.
They call back to us
from the gauzy edge of paradise,
good news, good news.

—Anne Sexton (1928-1974), "Letter Written on a Ferry While Crossing Long Island Sound" from All My Pretty Ones, 1962.

my soul's form bends

In this house, we post devotional poetry in multiple religions! I've alluded to this poem more than once over the years, but for various reasons I've never posted it; it seemed like it was time.

Let man's soul be a sphere, and then in this
The intelligence that moves, devotion is,
And as the other spheres, by being grown
Subject to foreign motion, lose their own,
And being by others hurried every day
Scarce in a year their natural form obey,
Pleasure or business so our souls admit
For their first mover, and are whirled by it.
Hence is't that I am carried towards the West
This day, when my soul's form bends towards the East.
There I should see a sun by rising set,
And by that setting endless day beget;
But that Christ on this cross did rise and fall,
Sin had eternally benighted all.
Yet dare I'almost be glad I do not see
That spectacle, of too much weight for me.
Who sees God's face, that is self life, must die:
What a death were it then to see God die!
It made his own lieutenant, Nature, shrink:
It made his footstool crack, and the sun wink.
Could I behold those hands which span the Poles,
And turn all spheres at once, pierced with those holes?
Could I behold that endless height which is
Zenith to us and our Antipodes,
Humbled below us? Or that blood, which is
The seat of all our souls, if not of his,
Make dirt of dust? Or that flesh, which was worn
By God for his apparel, rag'd and torn?
If on these things I durst not look, durst I
Upon his miserable mother cast mine eye,
Who was God's partner here, and furnish'd thus
Half of that sacrifice which ransom'd us?
Though these things as I ride be from mine eye,
They're present yet unto my memory,
For that looks towards them; and thou look'st towards me,
O Saviour, as though hang'st upon the tree.
I turn my back to thee but to receive
Corrections, till thy mercies bid thee leave.
O think me worth thine anger, punish me,
Burn off my rusts and my deformity;
Restore thine image so much by thy grace
That thou may'st know me, and I'll turn my face.

—John Donne (1572-1631), "Good Friday, 1613: Riding Westward," also known as "Good Friday: Made as I was Riding Westward that Day," "Good Friday," "Riding Westward," "A Meditation upon Good Friday, 1613" and several other variations; presumably written on April 2, 1613. The general consensus is that Donne was riding to visit Sir Edward Herbert in Wales. I had in my head the apocryphal theory that Donne was leaving London to get away from the plague when he wrote this poem, but I don't think that's actually true—1613 doesn't seem to have been a major plague year, even if it would make a good story, here in 2020. I slightly adapted the (modernized) orthography and punctuation from the massive Longman Complete Poems of John Donne, edited by Robin Robbins (2010), but with Donne you're always editing a little, even when you choose an edition. His poetry circulated so widely that there's no true standardized text, which personally I sort of like—e.g. line 22, which could be "tune all spheres" or "turn all spheres," both of which make sense in context and look pretty much exactly the same in secretary hand.

breath-in-me

I went looking for Passover poems and got stuck on this one, which is not actually a Passover poem. It feels applicable, though—Passover, like all Jewish holidays, is always at least a little about finding faith and hope (and community, and God) in dark places. This poem also gave me many unexpected feelings about poetry in Muslim Spain, vis a vis The Lions of Al-Rassan, so it's a little bit for mistresscurvy.

I look for you early,
my rock and my refuge,
         offering you worship
    morning and night;
before your vastness
I come confused
         and afraid, for you see
    the thoughts of my heart.

What could the heart
and tongue compose,
         or spirit's strength
    within me to suit you?
But song soothes you
and so I'll give praise
          to your being as long
    as your breath-in-me moves.

—Solomon Ibn Gabirol (c. 1022 to 1058-70), "I Look for You," translated by Peter Cole, from The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain 950-1492 (Princeton University Press, 2007). According to the Poetry Foundation bio, Solomon Ibn Gabriel (Shelomoh ben Yehudah Ibn Gabirol in Hebrew and Abu Ayyub Sulaiman ibn Yahya Ibn Jubayrol in Arabic) was a poet and philosopher who lived in Spain in the middle of the 11th century, and was part of the Jewish intellectual culture in Saragossa. Says the bio: "His Hebrew poetry draws from Arabic verse traditions, borrowing metrics, rhyme schemes, and imagery." Gosh.

where your heart is

Be broken. 

Lie there

on the ground

in the wreckage

until you can feel

all of your new jagged

edges individually. 

Notice how much more

surface area there is to you now. 

Notice there's a rhythm to the stinging. 

It will lead you back to your pulse. 

Try to move if you can. 

Follow the path the pain takes

when it forks and sharks

through your body. 

Focus on your uneven breath. 

Try to love the way it hitches now, 

how each drag of air cuts

through the field of panic. 

As your thoughts struggle

to harden into words, 

return to your breath. 

Pull yourself into sitting

as best you can. 

Be tender. 

Try speaking. 

Grasp the leathery

harness of your voice. 

How long have you been crying? 

Hum something

your mother taught you. 

Anything is fine. 

Feel it vibrate in your chest. 

That's where your heart is, 

still beating, 

still wrestling life into you, 

still pushing back against the world. 

—Mindy Nettifee, "Zen of the Broken," from Rise of the Trust Fall, 2010.

hermeneutics

I initially read this poem because of the title, but then I fell in love a little. 

All winter she's been growing more powerful.

Radiant, says the man at the bar.

Voluptuous, says the docent.

Nervy, says God.

All winter her soul has been juddering.

It feels like drinking gold flakes!

The word sleeps inside the stone.

The wind tongues the underside of the lake.

Inside the rifle scope of time, God

teaches her Grounding Techniques

through his emissary, a Certified Therapist.

Beetles bore their dirty traffic into pine trees.

God says, You cling to deixis

like a life raft. Here, you

say. Now, you say. All winter, you say, like it means

something, days crossed off your compulsive

calendar, wind tied to your wrist like

a pet. This dumb hunger for

fixity! I made your cells

to shed, says God. See them

everywhere, everywhere.

She bites her lip till it bleeds.

Who wouldn't immanentize the eschaton, if they could,

build heaven on earth in the backyard?

She wouldn't, is who.

Day a slit-throated ewe.

She wears a prayer around her neck

in another language, no clue

what it says.

Who will translate the prayer?

Listen: she loved a happy libertine

and thought that was heaven.

To ground herself

she strips berries from the juniper bushes.

Well, says God,

Alexander the Great dyed his hair

saffron. We are all

made fools in this world.

—Kerri Webster, "Hermeneutics," Poetry (October 2016).

their prayers were weathered rib bones

Happy Sunday, friends. ♥

There was the method of kneeling,
a fine method, if you lived in a country
where stones were smooth.
The women dreamed wistfully of bleached courtyards, 
hidden corners where knee fit rock.
Their prayers were weathered rib bones,
small calcium words uttered in sequence,
as if this shedding of syllables could somehow 
fuse them to the sky.

There were the men who had been shepherds so long 
they walked like sheep.
Under the olive trees, they raised their arms—
Hear us! We have pain on earth!
We have so much pain there is no place to store it!
But the olives bobbed peacefully
in fragrant buckets of vinegar and thyme.
At night the men ate heartily, flat bread and white cheese, 
and were happy in spite of the pain, 
because there was also happiness.

Some prized the pilgrimage,
wrapping themselves in new white linen 
to ride buses across miles of vacant sand. 
When they arrived at Mecca 
they would circle the holy places, 
on foot, many times,
they would bend to kiss the earth
and return, their lean faces housing mystery.

While for certain cousins and grandmothers
the pilgrimage occurred daily, 
lugging water from the spring
or balancing the baskets of grapes.
These were the ones present at births,
humming quietly to perspiring mothers.
The ones stitching intricate needlework into children’s dresses, 
forgetting how easily children soil clothes.

There were those who didn’t care about praying.
The young ones. The ones who had been to America. 
They told the old ones, you are wasting your time.
           Time?—The old ones prayed for the young ones. 
They prayed for Allah to mend their brains,
for the twig, the round moon,
to speak suddenly in a commanding tone.

And occasionally there would be one
who did none of this,
the old man Fowzi, for example, Fowzi the fool, 
who beat everyone at dominoes,
insisted he spoke with God as he spoke with goats, 
and was famous for his laugh.

—Naomi Shihab Nye (b. 1952), "Different Ways to Pray" from Words Under the Words: Selected Poems (Portland, Oregon: Far Corner Books, 1995). I fucking love Naomi Shihab Nye.

the soul's wicked cartridge

The first Rita Dove poem I ever posted, way back in 2009, was "Ludwig Van Beethovens' Return to Vienna" from Sonata Mulattica: A Life in Five Movements and a Short Play (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2009). It's still one of my favorites, and although I've posted a whole lot of Rita Dove in the years since, I haven't been back to Sonata Mulattica since 2010. I bought a copy a couple of years ago, though, and it's time. To tell the truth, I really recommend just going and reading the whole book; but nevertheless, here is another one I love, for some of the same reasons:

I kneel, but not in sufferance, 
not in faith. There is a fulcrum
beyond which the bow tip wobbles;

no ardency nor forceful wrist
can make it sing. I am there,
at wit's balancing point. Music

pours through the blackened nave,
hollowing my bones to fit
the space it needs. It needs

so much of me, the soul's
wicked cartridge emptying
as fast as it fills. I kneel

because even the reed bends
before God's laughter
splits it, and the storm

moves on.

—Rita Dove (b. 1952), "Cambridge, Great St. Mary's Church" from Sonata Mulattica, 2009.

go out into your heart

I borrowed my friend K's copy of Rainer Maria Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God back in January, when I was upstate for her secret wedding. K told me to keep Rilke through poetry month, and I can't disappoint her, can I? There are a lot of really spectacular poems in this volume, but this one got me where I live.

You are not surprised at the force of the storm—
you have seen it growing.
The trees flee. Their flight
sets the boulevards streaming. And you know:
he whom they flee is the one
you move toward. All your senses
sing him, as you stand at the window.

The weeks stood still in summer.
The trees' blood rose. Now you feel
it wants to sink back
into the source of everything. You thought
you could trust the power
when you plucked the fruit;
now it becomes a riddle again,
and you again a stranger.

Summer was like your house: you knew
where each thing stood.
Now you must go out into your heart
as onto a vast plain. Now
the immense loneliness begins.

The days go numb, the wind
sucks the world from your senses like withered leaves.
Through the empty branches the sky remains.
It is what you have.
Be earth now, and evensong.
Be the ground lying under that sky.
Be modest now, like a thing
ripened until it is real,
so that he who began it all
can feel you when he reaches for you.

—Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), II, i from "The Book of Pilgrimage," from Book of Hours, translated from the German by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy (New York: Riverhead Books, revised edition, 2005).

let my words turn into sparks

It's April 30, which means that this is the last poem of the month. Time is kind of weird, right? This is not an April poem, or even a spring poem; it's actually a Yom Kippur poem, which is maybe a little weird to post in April. But for me, this time of year is always a transitional moment, and I think this poem is the right one to be going on with, this year.

On the birthday of the world
I begin to contemplate
what I have done and left
undone, but this year
not so much rebuilding

of my perennially damaged
psyche, shoring up eroding
friendships, digging out
stumps of old resentments
that refuse to rot on their own.

No, this year I want to call
myself to task for what
I have done and not done
for peace. How much have
I dared in opposition?

How much have I put
on the line for freedom?
For mine and others?
As these freedoms are pared,
sliced and diced, where

have I spoken out? Who
have I tried to move? In
this holy season, I stand
self-convicted of sloth
in a time when lies choke

the mind and rhetoric
bends reason to slithering
choking pythons. Here
I stand before the gates
opening, the fire dazzling

my eyes and as I approach
what judges me, I judge
myself. Give me weapons
of minute destruction. Let
my words turn into sparks.

—Marge Piercy (b. 1936), "The birthday of the world," from The Crooked Inheritance (2006), although in this case from The Hunger Moon: New and Selected Poems, 1980-2010 (2012).

See you next year, friends. ♥

calm and work

Lord Whoever, thank you for this air
I'm about to in- and exhale, this hutch
in the woods, the wood for fire,
the light—both lamp and the natural stuff
of leaf-back, fern, and wing.
For the piano, the shovel
for ashes, the moth-gnawed
blankets, the stone-cold water
stone-cold: thank you.
Thank you, Lord, coming for
to carry me here—where I'll gnash
it out, Lord, where I'll calm
and work, Lord, thank you
for the goddamn birds singing!

—Thomas Lux (b. 1946), "Poem in Thanks," in this case from New and Collected Poems, 1975-1995 (Houghton Mifflin, 1997).