winter’s offerings of love&loss&longing. before the small poems, three longer reads I loved these last couple months: a teacher’s reflection on sharing poetry with her students, a lyric essay examining a dead bird in a tree, a grieving widow’s elegy for her beloved.

ESSO—SO—SO—SO by Elizabeth Ann Dark

I tend to believe that poetry is powerful enough that mere exposure to it has potency. I simply read the poem aloud to my students once, maybe twice, trusting that it will do the work and that a few students will think—no, they will realize, to borrow from Mary Oliver, “…that it was all the time words that you yourself, out of your own heart had been saying.”

Augury by Lia Purpura

But yellow gets to be glorious, too.

The Light of the World by Elizabeth Alexander (with special attention to Part III, “The Edges of Me in the Hands of My Wife”)

The ones we may come to love have been born by the time we start longing for them.

and now for the poems!

*thick, red velvet curtains draw open, lights dim, a hush falls over the theatre*

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by Jane Hirschfield from October Tooth

 

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by Mary Karr

 

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“Hammond B3 Organ Cistern” by Gabrielle Calvocoressi

 

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(you can listen to lucille read this aloud here)

 

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“Katherine with the Lazy Eye. Short. And Not a Good Poet” by francine j. harris

h/t to Sarah Kay’s stunning reflection in Poetry RX, which grew my love for this poem tenfold. an excerpt:

 

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