Poetry Friday: Danusha Laméris

Small Kindnesses

I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.
And sometimes, when you spill lemons
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile
at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress
to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,
and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.
We have so little of each other, now. So far
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,
have my seat,” “Go ahead—you first,” “I like your hat.”

I came across this poem in the anthology How to Love the World last year, and still think of it often. I found out recently that Laméris collaborated with a number of young people on a poem celebrating more everyday kindnesses (NYTimes gift link). The whole thing is worth reading, but one line made me catch my breath: “what kindness can do to help this ruined world.”

Happy Friday, friends. May you seek, give and receive kindness where you need it today.

April is National Poetry Month, and I’ve been sharing poetry on Fridays here, as I do each year.

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Poetry Friday: Camille T. Dungy

from What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison

I.   

Only now, in spring, can the place be named: 
tulip poplar, daffodil, crab apple,   
dogwood, budding pink-green, white-green, yellow   
on my knowing.   All winter I was lost.   
Fall, I found myself here, with no texture   
my fingers know.   Then, worse, the white longing   
that downed us deep three months.   No flower heat.   
That was winter.   But now, in spring, the buds   
flock our trees.   Ten million exquisite buds,   
tiny and loud, flaring their petalled wings,   
bellowing from ashen branches vibrant   
keys, the chords of spring’s triumph: fisted heart,   
dogwood; grail, poplar; wine spray, crab apple.   
The song is drink, is color.   Come.   Now.   Taste.

I recently read Dungy’s wonderful memoir, Soil (coming in May), which explores her experience of tending and diversifying her Colorado garden. I’m less familiar with her poetry, but loved this one – you can read the full poem at the Poetry Foundation website.

April is National Poetry Month, and I am sharing poetry – with an emphasis on women – on Fridays this month, as I do every year. 

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Poetry Friday: Rainer Maria Rilke

Early Spring

Harshness vanished. A sudden softness
has replaced the meadows’ wintry grey.
Little rivulets of water changed
their singing accents. Tendernesses,

hesitantly, reach toward the earth
from space, and country lanes are showing
these unexpected subtle risings
that find expression in the empty trees.

I saw this poem on Nicole’s Instagram back in March, and it seemed absolutely perfect for the “beautiful, capricious, reluctant” springs we often get here in New England.

April is National Poetry Month, and I am sharing poetry on Fridays this month, as I do every year. 

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Poetry Friday: Laura Girardeau

Easter, Picacho Peak

We sleep in the desert
on a land full of stories,
and all night the wind reads the news.
We’ve left our attachments –
expectations and a newspaper –
on the picnic table for the night,
surrendering our documented selves
and reported names to sleep.

All night the wind sifts our dreams,
reading the truth.
We sleep deeply but aware,
like stones skipping water,
and hear the news
doing somersaults over the land.
Finally, it blows into a cactus,
sacrificed on a crown of thorns.

The moon encrypts new names
into our dreams, and near dawn,
coyotes sing the real headlines
in yips of happiness.

We wake to a world without word,
only scent and beauty.
The Word is written
everywhere on the land.

I discovered this poem last fall in the wonderful anthology What Wildness Is This. As we approach both spring and Easter weekend, I thought it seemed fitting to share here.

April is National Poetry Month, and I am sharing poetry – with an emphasis on women – here on Fridays this month, as I do every year. 

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Poetry Friday: Victoria Adukwei Bulley

There You Are

There you are
this cold day
boiling the water on the stove
pouring the herbs into the pot
hawthorn, rose;
buying the tulips
& looking at them, holding
your heart in your hands at the table
saying please, please to nobody else
here in the kitchen with you.
How hard, how heavy this all is.
How beautiful, these things you do,
in case they help, these things you do
which, although you haven’t said it yet,
say that you want to live.

My friend Roxani – who finds the best poems – shared this one on Twitter recently.

Tomorrow kicks off National Poetry Month, and I’ll be sharing poetry on Fridays here, as I do each year.

I love the quiet daily-ness of this poem, and that last line is tremendous. I hope you enjoy.

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Poetry Friday: Ada Limón

Before

No shoes and a glossy
red helmet, I rode
on the back of my dad’s
Harley at seven years old.
Before the divorce.
Before the new apartment.
Before the new marriage.
Before the apple tree.
Before the ceramics in the garbage.
Before the dog’s chain.
Before the koi were all eaten
by the crane. Before the road
between us, there was the road
beneath us, and I was just
big enough not to let go:
Henno Road, creek just below,
rough wind, chicken legs,
and I never knew survival
was like that. If you live,
you look back and beg
for it again, the hazardous
bliss before you know
what you would miss.

I have been thinking a lot about the lives we live “before” (this time of year makes me remember, vividly, the process of going through my divorce, three years ago). This poem of Limón’s made me think of Nora Ephron’s lists of what she would (and wouldn’t) miss, written before her death in 2012.

April is National Poetry Month, and I am sharing poetry – with an emphasis on women of color – here on Fridays this month, as I do every year. 

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Poetry Friday: Marge Piercy

If they come in the night

Long ago on a night of danger and vigil
a friend said, why are you happy?
He explained (we lay together
on a cold hard floor) what prison
meant because he had done
time, and I talked of the death
of friends. Why are you happy
then, he asked, close to
angry.

I said, I like my life. If I
have to give it back, if they
take it from me, let me
not feel I wasted any, let me
not feel I forgot to love anyone
I meant to love, that I forgot
to give what I held in my hands,
that I forgot to do some little
piece of the work that wanted
to come through.

Sun and moonshine, starshine,
the muted light off the waters
of the bay at night, the white
light of the fog stealing in,
the first spears of morning
touching a face
I love. We all lose
everything. We lose
ourselves. We are lost.

Only what we manage to do
lasts, what love sculpts from us;
but what I count, my rubies, my
children, are those moments
wide open when I know clearly
who I am, who you are, what we
do, a marigold, an oakleaf, a meteor,
with all my senses hungry and filled
at once like a pitcher with light.

It has been a hard and heavy few weeks in the headlines, and this poem – found via Abby Rasminsky – made me think of Ukraine and also of my own life. I hope it moves you.

April is National Poetry Month, and I am sharing poetry – with an emphasis on women – here on Fridays this month, as I do every year. 

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Poetry Friday: Lucille Clifton

flowers

here we are
running with the weeds
colors exaggerated
pistils wild
embarrassing the calm family flowers oh
here we are
flourishing for the field
and the name of the place
is Love

I found this poem in How to Carry Water, a robust collection of Clifton’s poems. I love its riotous exuberance, its verbs, its unapologetic flourishing. And that last line! As a flower geek and a perennial optimist, I love it all.

April is National Poetry Month, and I am sharing poetry – with an emphasis on women of color – here on Fridays this month, as I do every year. 

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Poetry Friday: Danusha Lameris

Insha’Allah

I don’t know when it slipped into my speech
that soft word meaning, “if God wills it.”
Insha’Allah I will see you next summer.
The baby will come in spring, insha’Allah.
Insha’Allah this year we will have enough rain.

So many plans I’ve laid have unraveled
easily as braids beneath my mother’s quick fingers.

Every language must have a word for this. A word
our grandmothers uttered under their breath
as they pinned the whites, soaked in lemon,
hung them to dry in the sun, or peeled potatoes,
dropping the discarded skins into a bowl.

Our sons will return next month, insha’Allah.
Insha’Allah this war will end, soon. Insha’Allah
the rice will be enough to last through winter.

How lightly we learn to hold hope,
as if it were an animal that could turn around
and bite your hand. And still we carry it
the way a mother would, carefully,
from one day to the next.

I discovered Danusha Laméris via her poem “Small Kindnesses,” included in the collection How to Love the World. This poem came to me via social media, I think; I am so grateful to the Poetry Foundation for holding and sharing so many wonderful poems.

April is National Poetry Month, and I will be sharing poetry here on Fridays this month, as I do every year. 

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Poetry Friday: Lucille Clifton

Let there be new flowering

Let there be new flowering
in the fields let the fields
turn mellow for the men
let the men keep tender
through the time let the time
be wrested from the war
let the war be won
let love be
at the end

I read this poem on Natalie Jabbar’s excellent poetry blog the day after the Derek Chauvin verdict (which was also the day I got my first vaccine). It made me straight-up cry. Let love be at the end.

April is National Poetry Month, and I have been sharing poetry – with an emphasis on women of color – here on Fridays this month, as I do every year. 

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