Brendan Berls
Outside, nothing moves: only the rain
nailing the house up like a coffin.
A jolt of recognition hit me as I read Bert Meyers’ “Rainy Day” one sunny morning two Junes ago. Twenty years before, I’d heard another Meyers poem (“Daybreak”) read aloud and loved it, but for the life of me couldn’t remember the poet’s name—just that his work was unjustly obscure and out of print. Yet Meyers’ voice is so distinctive (“the iron rain, with its little keys / is closing all the doors. . .”) that I knew immediately this was the poet I’d been looking for. I bought the book—itself a revelation of what the humble lyric poem is capable of—and now teach his work to my high school students. They love it, too.
Click here to read Bert Meyers’ poem “Rainy Day”
Rashmi Sadana
ek jagah par jaise bhañvar haiñ lekin chakkar rahtā hai
yaʿnī vat̤an daryā hai us meñ chār t̤araf haiñ safar meñ abLike the whirlpool, still centre of a giddy circling,
the homeland’s an ocean that scatters us in all directions.(Divān-e Panjum: V.1579.4)
I was moved by Ranjit Hoskote’s English translation of Mir’s Urdu poetry excerpt, “The Homeland’s an Ocean”. Reading the Urdu alongside the English, the mix of those languages, strikes a chord with me, since I grew up with parents who used to recite Urdu ghazals with their Punjabi friends in LA. Seeing the original and the translation side by side also resonates with how I teach about India as a deeply multilingual society in my anthropology classes at Mason. I have my students learn local idioms to understand people’s worldviews. Mir’s idea that “the homeland’s an ocean that scatters us in all directions” is wonderfully subversive, getting us to think and feel beyond origins and attachments. It makes me want to migrate into his world.
Click here to read Ranjit Hoskote’s translations of Mir Taqi Mir
Laura Celis
Shy panzer of the swamp, atavistic
in your haughty calm, you blink at us
encapsulated in our swanky Prius
Peter Filkins’ poem “Turtle” is one of my favorites. I initially read it because it was published in the Johns Hopkins University Press, but after reading it, I was left feeling deeply reflective. The poem made me think about my own life, particularly my junior year, which will significantly affect my college and future. The turtle is described as a “shy panzer”—an ancient creature that is older than us all. Its slow, steady pace contrasts with the fast-moving world around it, symbolized by the Prius. The poem explores profound themes like death and the journey of life. It portrays the turtle as wise, moving at its own pace, unaffected by the world’s rush. This resonated with me deeply, reminding me that, despite high school’s hectic pace, I can find peace in knowing that as long as I work hard and stay focused on the path ahead of me, everything else will fall into place. The poem inspired me to take a step back, breathe, and trust the process because as for the rest, “it indeed will come”.
Click here to read Peter Filkins’ “Turtle”
I Echo
Because she still won’t sleep alone, you sleep deeply
with her small warm body wrapped in your arms.
Because it won’t always be so, you let it be like this.
I disappoint myself. I hold my memory in my hands, searching for the exact hour I read Chloe Martinez’s “Rationale” from the Poetry Daily newsletter, but the memory slips out of my hands like an egg.
I imagine that the morning of the poem’s feature in July 2024, I am in my sister’s apartment trying to keep my life. I am alone in my sister’s apartment because my sister is at work. I am alone in my sister’s apartment because I am tired of taking my life to places and people, asking to fill what I cannot fill—a job, some money, or happiness. I am tired and alone, consumed by every lack except my ability to do Poetry. So, when a mail alert arrives and I see ‘Poetry Daily,’ the sunlight icon, ‘Today’s Poem,’ by it, I will open it like a lover’s mouth just to taste even the littlest delight. The poem will not make sense to me when I do not see myself in it. Full of every other thing, I cannot make room to care about a ‘she’ who refuses to sleep alone nor the warmth of her skin. But, I will make room for something other than despair. I will run to my Notes app, & like a Prophet, head full of lightning, I will write, ‘Because you were waiting / for something, something came to you, despite recent despair, / despite your intermittent rages. Because you were in need.’ A salve. Uncertainty breathes everywhere, but I will hold those lines like law. I hold it like law.
Click here to read Chloe Martinez’s “Rationale”
Marilyn Gates
I see everything
everything sees.
I keep circling back to Temperance Aghamohammadi’s “Blue Harp” — perhaps fitting for a poem which declares grief “a circle a circle / never escaped.” I’m drawn to the speaker’s simultaneous disorientation and direction, how definitively she “go[es] to no one,” how decisively she avers that “something / will die.” And, of course, that final punny, tender assertion, showing poetry’s capacity to playfully embody the solemn. To — in a world where Eve herself has been beheaded — demand connection, even to the void, even with a barren environment that appears not to have much connection left to share. Demand anyway. What else do you have to lose?
Click here to read Temperance Aghamohammadi’s “Blue Harp”
