What happens when home is not a place of safety, but a locus of loneliness and even danger and violence? Jocelyn Ulevicus' poem describes a solitude and a fear around isolation wrapped in memories of past violence, and explores what finally settling into a sense of safety really means.
We must endeavor to rise above the patterns set out for us by others, according to Stafford, and not follow in a line like elephants holding each other's tails; it is imperative, he writes, that 'awake people be awake' since 'the darkness around us is deep'.
Everlasting Nothing is the final track on singer/songwriter Beck's album Hyperspace. It describes a series of experiences with an unreal bent in which there is a continuous push to 'get back home'.
This sonnet by American poet and playwright Edna St. Vincent Millay is addressed to a lover and to the latent sense of impermanence and loss built in to all moments when one becomes conscious of great love or great happiness.
In an echo of the defiance of Wendell Berry's 'Do Not Be Ashamed', Alice Walker draws up the image of an outcast to underline the importance of tenaciousness and standing one's ground in the midst of madness.
Osip Mandelstam spent many years of his life being persecuted for the views he held and the work he made. 'And I Was Once Alive' was one of the last poems he wrote before his death from heart failure in a transfer camp.
In this short poem, Li Bai writes about the experience of zazen (meditation) using some of the simplest and most common imagery of the time - birds and clouds for the passing phenomena of the mind, and the mountain for the stability of awareness, which eventually is the only thing that remains.
'Let's stop for one second,' wrote Pablo Neruda in a poetic manifesto for the very personal and very political act of doing nothing. He imagined the world stopping to catch its breath for a moment, and the 'sudden strangeness' that would emerge.
'Poetry is one way of reading this world,' according to poet Dane Cervine, whose new collection, The World is God’s Language, takes its title from a quote by French philosopher and mystic, Simone Weil.
The Heart of Our Home is a poem about moving one's life and a meditation on building a new life in a new place that touches upon themes of nostalgia, renewal, and hope
