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.
Tag: memory
M. Christine Benner Dixon – Portrait of Dad at the Cutting Board
M. Christine Benner Dixon's poem is an intimate portrait of her father, remembered from childhood.
Sanctuary
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 – Redemption
Amanda Smith-Hatch's Redemption is an attempt to capture the profundity hidden within a seemingly banal moment in time.
Todd Williams – Lost Socks
Todd Williams wrote this poem shortly after the death of his father, having gone through his clothes and belongings.
Dad Too Late
BY KENT JACOBSON My father clomped through life with boots—“Your mother will turn you into a softy”— and died early.
Jorge Luis Borges – Poem Written in a Copy of Beowulf
The Argentine writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges once wrote: “I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
Lucille Clifton – why some people be mad at me sometimes
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.
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.
David Whyte on Love and Separation
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