To feel fearful is to feel small and sometimes overwhelmed by life and death which appear to be separate and distinct from one another and from ourselves.
Category: Poetry
D. H. Lawrence – Phoenix
D. H. Lawrence asks what is necessary for true change, finding his answer in the legend of the phoenix, who has to be burnt thoroughly and burnt while alive in order to regenerate herself again.
Peter Spaulding – Déjà Vu, According to The Matrix
Peter Spaulding's Déjà Vu, According to the Matrix starts with the Smiths and a scene from The Matrix, and builds up in layers of playful, random meaning and free-associative lines that run through the poem.
Gregory Pardlo – Raisin
The anxieties of fatherhood and the tension of generational and racial dynamics weave through Gregory Pardlo's vibrant and dense poem, Raisin.
Janette Schafer – Passagio
Janette Schafer describes her short poem, Passagio, as 'a haiku of hope.'
David Whyte – The Bell and the Blackbird
The call of awakening can come in any form, even from something as simple as the voice of a blackbird, in David Whyte's poem, The Bell and the Blackbird.
Holly Allen – Michigan Green
Holly Allen's poem Michigan Green recalls the summers spent in Michigan with her great-grandmother.
Wendell Berry – The Peace of Wild Things
Berry's poem looks to nature for release from world-weariness and despair, and suggests a kind of liberation through reviving our relationship with the wilderness.
Elizabeth Alexander – Equinox
Alexander's poem Equinox is about life and energy, and how it slowly disappears, sometimes the force leaving the body still living, but an empty shell.
William Shakespeare – When I Consider Everything That Grows
A sonnet from the 'Fair Youth' series that was occupied with themes of aging, passing time and the transience of physical beauty.