Susan Mackervoy
I walk out from the tutorial. There
are rooms with people reading, conversations.
Mountainside, glimpsed through a window. I feel
ancient, the oldest one here.
from the journal
PN 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.
- May 28, 2020
Ulalume González de León (translated from the Spanish by Terry Ehret, John Johnson, & Nancy J. Morales)
6:13
and all that’s left is time
No, not time
All that’s left
are the goodbyes
- May 27, 2020
Ellen Bryant Voigt
Sweet are the songs of envy and despair,
which count the healthy strangers that we meet
and mark the neighbors' illness mild and brief,
the birds that go on nesting, the brilliant air.
- May 26, 2020
Sasha Steensen
Sometimes it is ok to be afraid
& necessary
I have one hand
with fear
in it
I hold
it out
toward the wilds
- May 25, 2020
W.H. Auden
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position
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