I’m fond of poems about weather, and I especially like this poem by Todd Davis for the way it looks at how fog affects whatever is within and beneath it.
It’s a rare occasion when I find dozens of poems by just one poet that I’d like to share with you, but Joyce Sutphen, who lives in Minnesota, is someone who writes that well, with that kind of appeal. Here is just one example. How many of us have marveled at how well our parents have succeeded at a long marriage?
Here’s our Halloween poem for this year, in the thin dry voice of a ghost, as captured by Katie Cappello who lives in Northern California.
I have three dogs and they are always insisting on one thing or another. Having a dog is like having…
During our more than four years of publishing this column we’ve shown you a number of poems about motherhood. Here’s…
There’s only so much we can do to better ourselves, and once we’ve done what we can, it still may not have been enough. Here’s a poem by Michelle Y. Burke, who lives in N.Y., in which a man who does everything right doesn’t quite do everything right.
I’ve spent my seventy years on The Great Plains and have lived all that time amidst vivid and touching stories about the settlement of our area, lots of them much like this one, about a long ago courtship and marriage, offered to us in a poem by James Doyle, who lives in Colorado.
I love to sit outside and be very still until some little creature appears and begins to go about its business, and here is another poet, Robert Gibb, of Pennsylvania, doing just the same thing.
One of my friends told me he’d seen a refrigerator magnet that read, PARENTING; THE FIRST 40 YEARS ARE THE HARDEST. Here’s a fine poem about parenthood, and about letting go of children, by Chana Bloch, who lives in Berkeley, California.
In our busy times, the briefest pause to express a little interest in the natural world is praiseworthy. Most of us spend our time thinking about other people, and scarcely any time thinking about other creatures. I recently co-edited an anthology of poems about birds, and we looked through lots of books and magazines, but here is a fine poem we missed, by Tara Bray, who lives in Richmond, Virginia.
I’ve read dozens of poems written about the events of September 11, 2001, but this one by Tony Gloeggler of New York City is the only one I’ve seen that addresses the good fortune of a survivor.
Because I’m a senior citizen I’m easily attracted by poems about my brothers and sisters meandering into their golden years….
Peter Everwine is a California poet whose work I have admired for almost as long as I have been writing. Here he beautifully captures a quiet moment of reflection.
Here’s hoping that very few of our readers have to go through cardiac rehab, which Thomas Reiter of New Jersey captures in this poem, but if they do, here’s hoping that they come through it feeling wildly alive and singing at the tops of their lungs.
I recognize the couple who are introduced in this poem by Patricia Frolander, of Sundance, Wyoming, and perhaps you’ll recognize them, too.
We are sometimes amazed by how well the visually impaired navigate the world, but like the rest of us, they have found a way to do what interests them. Here Jan Mordenski of Michigan describes her mother, absorbed in crocheting.
It is enough for me as a reader that a poem take from life a single moment and hold it up for me to look at. There need not be anything sensational or unusual or peculiar about that moment, but somehow, by directing my attention to it, our attention to it, the poet bathes it in the light of the remarkable. Here is a poem like this by Carolyn Miller, who lives in San Francisco.
If writers are both skilled and lucky, they may write something that will carry their words into the future, past…
Here’s a poem by Susan Meyers, of South Carolina, about the most ordinary of activities, washing the dishes, but in this instance remembering this ordinary routine provides an opportunity for speculation about the private pleasures of a lost parent.
Tell a whiny child that she sounds like a broken record, and she’s likely to say, “What’s a record?” Jeff Daniel Marion, a Tennessee poet, tells us not only what 78 rpm records were, but what they meant to the people who played them, and to those who remember the people who played them.
