Themes
Sweet dreams
We’re accustomed to thinking of nightmares as dreams that allow us to feel emotions we wall off in our waking hours, the surfacing of subconscious fears to the conscious mind. But we don’t have a corresponding word for dreams that bring joy.
MoreThe awkward stage: love’s secret agent
Thank goodness for poet Lawrence Raab. In “My Life Before I Knew It” he says everything I wanted to tell my kids about heading off regret and seeing grace at work in your life.
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A powerful woman on powerlessness
Harper invites us to imagine the complete and utter powerlessness of people on the slave block, particularly of mothers. Defenseless, unheeded, bitter, frail, shrinking, mournful, desolate. The adjectives heap misery on misery.
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Black Beauty
February is Black History Month, and I have six poems queued up to celebrate it. Each poem shines a light on parts of U.S. history not emphasized in my own history education, which unfortunately was of the Social Studies ilk. (Social Studies, boring and artificial, caused huge gaps in my knowledge of world history and […]
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