Gary Glauber
My daughter is in the kitchen, working out death.
One Poetry Daily that struck a resonant chord was May 31, 2024’s Sad Rollercoaster by Jared Harél. The poem chronicles the summer in which his daughter came to understand Death. In second grade, I wrote a dirge contemplating the black void of nothingness. This prompted a meeting with my teacher, parents, and principal. I explained the poem as an attempt to wrap my head around the notion of Death, rather than as a call for help. The second-grade mind is hard to decipher, and the bleak existential tone didn’t help. Now, as both a parent and an educator, I appreciate the additional check into authorial intent. Teaching high school kids sometimes elicits flights of fancy that raise eyebrows and might be a similar cause for concern. Yet the poet in me understands the need to explore thought into poetry with no regrets too. Harél’s poem awakened these vivid memories and relevant thoughts.
Click here to read Jared Harél’s poem “Sad Rollercoaster”
Karen Admussen
History will empty its silences
There is so much to love about Brenda Cárdenas’ poem Tranquilo. I don’t know Spanish, but I don’t need to. When I read the title I immediately think of tranquility, peace. The first line grabs me with its images. I picture the orange glow of the sunset highlighted by tiny glowing fireflies. I hear the soothing sounds of crickets. The soft alliteration of sunflowers, spill, sleepy, and seeds sounds like someone saying, “Sh, go to sleep.” The writer acknowledges the subject’s suffering then ends the poem on a positive note. Feast. We will all die, so release your pain and savor life. And paint/with me this elusive magenta morning. A new day has come. We don’t know what it will entail, but there’s a beautiful sunrise. Let’s enjoy the day and forget about yesterday’s troubles.
Click here to read Brenda Cárdenas’ poem “Tranquilo”
Antonia Matthew
Goodbye to the elms,
to the farm, to the dog.
The bus starts. The light
grows richer; the fog,
shifting, salty, thin,
comes closing in.
Late afternoon. An old blue bus heads west, windshield flashing pink. Fog moves in, settles on hens’ feathers, grey cabbages. The bus stops for lone travelers. The passengers settle down, quiet conversations run together. Suddenly the bus stops with a jolt. A moose looms in the middle of the road, approaches the bus, sniffs the bus’s hot hood. Passengers whisper, “high as a church,” “homely as a house,” “otherworldly.” The bus fills with a sweet sensation of joy. I see it all.
I feel it all. I am there on this journey with its moment of joy.
Click here to read Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “The Moose”
Reece Steidle
Every poem of death
should start
with my mother’s love
for birds.
Almost one year before I read this poem, my dad found a hummingbird lying on our driveway. Although it looked dead, he picked it up and spoke to it softly until it flew off. This called that moment to mind and I realized that it was exactly what I needed to hear at a time when I wasn’t noticing things like birds. The most meaningful moments in my life have been centered around little things like hummingbirds and family, and this poem reminded me that even in a sea of unhappiness, just a moment with nature can make everything worthwhile.
K. Martha Sprano Levitt
“Loving something can save you . . .”
That’s the surprise truth that bursts open in the middle of Bill Brown’s poem, “With the Help of Birds”. But who would have guessed it would be birds that could teach us how to live, how to love? Who would know that birds could save us from the “great mundane”, the lock of drudgery, the pall of days that spreads its shroud of tedium, of grief, of loneliness, of meaningless to-do lists?
And that’s exactly Brown’s point. Unless we awaken to them, we miss the lessons of birds—about life and death and all the joy that comes between. Brown writes,
There are worse things
than being dead.
You might be swallowed
by the daily minutia
of the great mundane,
to be spit up
years later
wondering where
your life has gone.
Birds, somehow, deliver us from that. They teach us how to love the world in the moments we are given—not through ambition or power—but in squabbles and dashes at rodents and feeders, in pecking and pulling at the earth, in creating chorus from every treetop, in claiming the air and wind with outstretched, glimmering wings.
Like the author’s mother, I have my favorites. Mine are the black crow, bold and self-assured, iridescent in sunlight. Even their intimidating caws and bad attitudes shine in contrast to the grey sluggish moments we allow to crawl across our lives, lost in motion that achieves no beauty, ignites no love or wonder.
Brown’s final image echoes this. When someone dismisses the life of a hummingbird as “short anyway”, Brown concludes that any time is long enough, if we live like the hummingbird—like any of the birds, really, where we draw our purpose from what we know to be true, and spread our wings in the grace of the world.
Click here to read Bill Brown’s Poem “With the Help of Birds”
