Valerie Duff
Birds crack seeds
on the other side of your glass
door. The body, blind, curves
its hedge down paths.
from the journal
The Common
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.
- July 4, 2020
Luke Patterson
eat biscuits wait for the wind to calm
sheepish hawks circle thermal pockets
birdsong warms the valley lips
- July 3, 2020
James Longenbach
A book is the future.
You dream
Of reading it, and once you’ve finished, it’s a miracle, you know the past.
- July 2, 2020
Yu Xiuhua (translated from the Chinese by Wang Fang & Yvonne Reddick)
I read your poems in a clean yard. All the world’s love-affairs
are a blur, like sparrows darting by,
and the years are pure as moonlight. No, I’m not being sentimental —
if I send you a book, it won’t be poetry.
- July 1, 2020
Anna Swir (translated from the Polish by Czesław Miłosz & Leonard Nathan)
The soul asks the body:
Is it true
that we do not really exist?
The body says:
I’m tanning my knees.
Poetry Daily Depends on You
With your support, we make reading the best contemporary poetry a treasured daily experience. Consider a contribution today.
We are thrilled to introduce our new editorial board, whose range of individual experience and expertise will bring new poems and publishers to our thousands of readers.
