Jane Kenyon
More sweet potatoes, less election hash
This past week I’ve heard stories of people not going home for Thanksgiving because they’re upset their relatives voted differently than they did. Add one more to the list of disheartening effects the 2016 election has had on our country. Thanksgiving is the holiday that’s supposed to bring us together. Thanksgiving is a holiday […]
MoreFall clean-up
Here’s the thing about my small folder of poems about death. Having more than one poem about death is like getting a bag of zucchini from your neighbor—you don’t know what to do with an overload. (I’m just realizing this very second that owning, not to mention labeling, a small folder of poems about death is […]
MoreBriefly I feel sorry for myself, and briefly grieve
Briefly It Enters, and Briefly Speaks by Jane Kenyon I am the blossom pressed in a book, found again after two hundred years. . . . I am the maker, the lover, and the keeper…. When the young girl who starves sits down to a table she will sit beside […]
MoreDeath on holiday
“Girls’ weekend” and “death” really shouldn’t keep company, but a few weekends ago they did, and all things considered, it was nice. This November, for the first time in 23 years, my high school girlfriends gathered without our friend Christine, who died at the tail end of last year. The remaining eight of us weren’t […]
MoreEmpty high school on Saturday
The Clothes Pin by Jane Kenyon How much better it is to carry wood to the fire than to moan about your life. How much better to throw the garbage onto the compost, or to pin the clean sheet on the line with a gray-brown wooden clothes pin! Did I really think a lonely and despondent […]
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