Themes
The 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 […]
MoreCountdown 2020, last 24 hours: Old wisdom for a new year
We’ve nearly reached the end, folks. The last day of our terrible no-good very bad year. To close out this series, I’ve selected a gentle poem, May Sarton’s “House of Gathering.” It’s like a deep cleansing breath. I taped it to a bench in a complex where my friend Sister Pat, 80 and going strong, […]
More2020 Countdown, day two: Take me to the river
On the second to last day of this sad and strange year, we turn to yet another poet who died in 2020. I left Lisel Mueller ‘s “Bedtime Story” on the banks of the Rouge River in suburban Michigan. Bedtime Story by Lisel Mueller The moon lies on the river like a […]
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