Rex Wilder
This brought back the hell of July,
When I hiked every chance
I got, talked to plants
And deer. I didn't want to die.
from the journal
Antioch Review
What Sparks Poetry is a serialized feature in which we invite poets to explore experiences and ideas that spark new poems. In our first series, The Poems of Others, we invited our editors to pay homage to the poems that led them to write. The Poems of Others II is a reprise of that series, opening the invitation to twenty-four poets from among our readers.
- June 4, 2020
Sherko Bekas (translated from the Kurdish by Choman Hardi)
— How sudden the bushes of scream in this field
flower and grow into green almonds.
How sudden the fallen songs in this field
germinate and turn into tulips.
- June 3, 2020
Keith S. Wilson
shall i tell you, then, that we exist?
there came a light, blue and white careening.
the police like wailing angels
to bitter me.
- June 2, 2020
Traci Brimhall
It's the garden spider who eats her mistakes
at the end of day so she can billow in the lung
of night, dangling from an insecure branch
or caught on the coral spur of a dove's foot,
and sleep, her spinnerets trailing radials like
ungathered hair. It's a million-pound cumulus.
- June 1, 2020
Gwendolyn Brooks
Carried her unprotesting out the door.
Kicked back the casket-stand. But it can't hold her,
That stuff and satin aiming to enfold her,
The lid's contrition nor the bolts before.
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