BY JOANN STEVELOS - What happens when an abandoned child grows up and one day buries her estranged father
Tag: Loneliness
Martine van Bijlert – this life we built
Martine van Bijlert's poem, this life we built, is a snapshot of domesticity and contentment, but with a tense uncertainty of the future.
Eugene Platt – September Poem
Eugene Platt's September Poem is a story of squandered romance, set against the backdrop of autumn's arrival.
Robert Frost – Acquainted with the Night
Robert Frost's sad and somber poem reads like a reminiscence told by a survivor of a period of bleakness so deep that it was something to be hidden
Healing With Our Wounds – Henri Nouwen on Working With Loneliness
Henri Nouwen wrote that when we can be with our own loneliness, we can begin to understand the suffering that underlies all of humanity.
Amy-Sarah Marshall – Shelled
Amy-Sarah Marshall's poem 'Shelled' touches on feelings of loss and remembrance through a minimal and pared-down verse.
Diane Ackerman – We Are Listening
'We Are Listening' is steeped in a sense of wonder at the scale of the universe, coupled with a tenderness towards the fragility of life.
Mary Oliver – Wild Geese
Wild Geese runs like an exhalation, beginning with a lifting of the weight of religious culpability - in the prairies and the deep trees, there is no onus to be good nor to string oneself out in repentance.
If Love Will Not Swing Wide the Gates, No Other Power Will
James Baldwin describes his own coming of age and awakening to spiritual and political consciousness as beginning with the revelation of sin: 'I became, during my fourteenth year, for the first time in my life, afraid—afraid of the evil within me and afraid of the evil without.'
Jocelyn Ulevicus – A Home Safe to Call Home
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.