Kelly Joslyn's quiet and simple poem Before the Hunt is a childhood reminiscence of her father. The child's early-morning attentiveness to her father extends to the dim lighting and the smell of the tangerine, like looking at an old Polaroid of something from childhood.
M. Christine Benner Dixon's poem is an intimate portrait of her father, remembered from childhood.
BY KENT JACOBSON A baseball field was a sanctuary for a small community of boys who were surrounded by angry fathers they were too young to understand.
Amanda Smith-Hatch's Redemption is an attempt to capture the profundity hidden within a seemingly banal moment in time.
Todd Williams wrote this poem shortly after the death of his father, having gone through his clothes and belongings.
BY KENT JACOBSON My father clomped through life with boots—“Your mother will turn you into a softy”— and died early.
The Argentine writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges once wrote: “I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
Poet Lucille Clifton once said, 'writing is a way of continuing to hope,' adding, 'perhaps for me it is a way of remembering I am not alone.' This powerful poem of hers resonates through its brevity and sparing use of language, which she was otherwise known for.
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.
If birth is a shock that whisks us out of another existence, a life that is whole and not lacking, then we can spend our whole lives in a state of longing for something we can't quite remember, that we can't quite articulate. In his poem about this kind of division and separation, 'Cleave', David… Continue reading David Whyte on Love and Separation
