spring arrives regardless

Happy April, even if I do not really feel like it is April—2024 has already been kind of a year. But we're still here, so, as always, there will be one poem per day (ish) between now and April 30. 

Every time I feel close
to understanding the world
the white kettle on my stove sounds
and I rise, attending to it
with annoyance and the pleasure
of the unmade cup of tea.
This is what it's like to live in March
or perhaps always, an unconvincing word
in any context. Blue-gold on night's branches
what part do we take in the play?
Whose turn is it to perform competence
and knowledge in the absence of both?
Unable to feel anything against the wind
I know it is spring. Time tells me so.
Never (equally as unconvincing)
have I been someone with faith in order
and human law. Love is unpredictable.
Spring arrives regardless.

—Alex Dimitrov, "March," from Love and Other Poems (2021), and brought to me via the wonderful folks at the poetryisnotaluxury instagram. Yes, I do recognize that this is the second year in a row I have posted a March poem on April 1.

monday

I missed yesterday due to general exhaustion and malaise, so there may be an extra poem (or two) sometime this week, but for today, a poem for a Monday.

I was just beginning
to wonder about my own life
and now I have to return to it
regardless of the weather
or how close I am to love.
Doesn't it bother you sometimes
what living is, what the day has turned into?
So many screens and meetings
and things to be late for.
Everyone truly deserves
a flute of champagne
for having made it this far!
Though it's such a disaster
to drink on a Monday.
To imagine who you would be
if you hadn't crossed the street
or married, if you hadn't
agreed to the job or the money
or how time just keeps going—
whoever agreed to that
has clearly not seen
the beginning of summer
or been to a party
or let themselves float
in the middle of a book
where for however briefly
it's possible to stay longer than
you should. Unfortunately
for me and you, we have
the rest of it to get to.
We must pretend
there's a blue painting
at the end of this poem.
And every time we look at it
we forget about ourselves.
And every time it looks at us
it forgives us for pain.

—Alex Dimitrov, "Monday," originally published in The New Yorker, August 23, 2021.

we're on the moon

Last April, there was an article in The New York Times (admittedly a publication that is Dead To Me, except for the Recipes section) about protest poetry in the United States, especially in the wake of the 2016 election. I feel very strongly about poetry as a means of resistance, now and always; one of the things I really like about this poem in particular, though, is how raw and immediate it feels—both because it's about the election, and because it isn't about the election. Anyway, poetry is kind of magic. Let's win the Midterms.

I'm looking at the moon tonight,
the closest it's been to Earth since 1948
and feel relieved we can do little to ruin it.
That can't be true, you say, and for a moment
even the moon's loneliness escapes isolation
and depends on something else. It's attached.
Like us and what we abandon. Us
and the evil we refuse. The same evil
we share history with, the thin membrane
between you or me and the worst of life.
It's already past midnight and another election
is over in the United States of America.
The oceans will not continue into infinity.
Nor will our money. Nor will this suffering.
We have voted and proven again
we do not know one another. I am trying
so hard to understand this country
, I tell youeven as I'm about to fail loving you (I know this)
in the way people need to be loved
which is without deception, which is almost
impossible. Don't you love it though, you say,
and I remember the first time I saw you in a room
without anyone else. Don't you love the moon?
And because it's easy to say it, I do, I make sure
to tell you I do. Despite the news I knew years ago:
no one saves anyone. We’re on the moon.

—Alex Dimitrov (b. 1984), "The Moon After Election Day" from Resistance, Rebellion, Life (Alfred A. Knopf: New York, 2017), and in this case from The New York Times, "Poems of Resistance: A Primer," April 21, 2017.