Poems for Your Life, v.05
Works by Franz Wright, Etel Adnan, Wendy Cope, Victoria Chang, June Jordan, Gregory Orr
Dearest,
What draws us to certain poems again and again—across time, across voices, across form? Sometimes it’s not the subject alone, but a shared frequency of feeling. What I offer today—each one holds a wound in the mouth like a stone: not to spit it out, but to speak through it. Whether it’s Franz Wright’s ongoing letter to the absent beloved, Etel Adnan’s grief braided with cloud and tree, or Gregory Orr’s realisation that even the source—even the beginning—is marked by hurt, these poems offer no false comfort. Instead, they return to elemental things: rain, bugs, rivers, dogs, sky, the act of writing itself.
What does it mean to name what is fleeting, overlooked, or disfigured by history? What does it mean to witness with tenderness a world that doesn’t often return the gaze? These poems do not pretend to solve grief or resolve longing. They ask instead: Can we live beside pain and still love the world? Can we become the sky, the wing, the leaf—if only for a moment? Across these works, there is a refusal to let go of wonder, even when wonder arrives bruised. There is a hunger for connection, for language, for meaning—not grandiose, but intimate, defiant in its softness. Taken together, these poems form a kind of landscape: one where presence is an act of resistance, and noticing is a kind of praise.
“I’m writing to you / all the time” — Franz Wright
This poem appeared in Walking to Martha's Vineyard: Poems by Franz Wright, published by Knopf, 2005.
“I love the rain when it / wraps me like a / river” — Etel Adnan
This poem appeared in Time by Etel Adnan, published by Nightboat Books, 2019.
“Every minute of sunshine, every shadow. / Every wisp of cloud” — Wendy Cope
This poem appeared in Anecdotal Evidence by Wendy Cope, published by Faber & Faber, 2018.
“Isn't that / like us, going from place to / place, looking to be alive?” — Victoria Chang
This poem appeared in The Trees Witness Everything by Victoria Chang, published by Copper Canyon Press, 2022.
“Lord / see how you run / YOUR BODY IS A LONG BLACK WING / YOUR BODY IS A LONG BLACK WING” — June Jordan
This poem appeared in Directed by Desire: The Complete Poems of June Jordan by June Jordan, published by Copper Canyon Press, 2005.
“Everybody’s / busy, so distraught they forget to kill me, / and even that won’t keep me alive.” — Natalie Shapero
This poem appeared in Poetry, 2013.
“I think: / Hurt won't be there. // But I'm wrong.” — Gregory Orr
This poem appeared in Concerning the Book That Is the Body of the Beloved by Gregory Orr, published by Copper Canyon Press, 2005.
May these poems hold you.
Yours,
T.
Thank you, I'm so grateful, these are beautiful.
God did I need that June Jordan especially. Thank you!