Poems for Your Life, v.06
Works by Molly Brodak, Yusef Komunyakaa, Sarah Clancy, Nikki Giovanni, Raymond Carver, Ada Limón, Rose Cook
Dearest,
There are mornings when I wake and forget, for a moment, everything I’m supposed to carry. The stillness feels accidental, like I’ve stumbled into a room before the noise begins. I sit in it and try not to prepare myself for whatever might go wrong today. I watch the light move across the floor and think, without meaning to, that I am grateful to be here.
Lately I’ve been paying attention to what slips past me. The small, almost nothing moments that shape the hours. A leaf sticking to the window. The sound of my neighbour’s footsteps in the hallway.
I am trying to stay present, to stop bracing for loss before it happens. To make room for the parts of myself that need slowness. I think I’ve been lonely, in the way that comes from being overwhelmed, from living too much in the future, from forgetting what it feels like to belong to the moment I’m in.
“I know there is a river somewhere, / lit, fragrant, golden mist, all that” — Molly Brodak
This poem appeared in The Cipher by Molly Brodak, published by Pleiades Press, 2020.
“Guardian angels, wherever you're hiding, / we know you can't be everywhere at once.” — Yusef Komunyakaa
This poem appeared in The Emperor of Water Clocks by Yusef Komunyakaa, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015.
“chances are / that you and I will never be as happy / as we are here doing the crossword” — Sarah Clancy
This poem appeared in The Truth and Other Stories by Sarah Clancy, published by Salmon Poetry, 2015.
“I don’t think / I’m allowed // To kill something // Because I am // Frightened” — Nikki Giovanni
This poem appeared in Chasing Utopia by Nikki Giovanni, published by MorrowPb, 2016.
“It sat there on the branch for a few minutes. / Then picked up and flew beautifully / out of my life.” — Raymond Carver
This poem appeared in All of Us: The Collected Poems by Raymond Carver, published by Vintage Books, 1996.
“a return / to the strange idea of continuous living despite / the mess of us, the hurt, the empty” — Ada Limón
This poem appeared in The Carrying by Ada Limón, published by Milkweed Editions, 2018.
“It needs repeating / over and over / to catch her attention / over and over,” — Rose Cook
This poem appeared in Notes From a Bright Field by Rose Cook, published by Cultured Llama, 2013.
May these poems hold you.
Yours,
T.
Thank you! I deeply admire your choice and presentation of poems. Keep up the great work! Many of us appreciate all your time, effort and great heart!
"all we can say now is
mercy, please rock me"
Do you know that often I skip to the final two or three lines of a poem. See if they stand on their own, make meaning without any other context. Find out if they hit me in the gut in that way that is pleasure and pain. Then I go back and read the poem in its entirety, already know what is coming, already having been rocked by the mastery of the end. My favorite poems, they all have final lines like this, lines that say everything to me, so that even if someone erased the remainder of the poem from existence, I somehow feel like I have still known it, been intimate with it.
Also, your opener today, everything before the image. I felt every word so deeply, as if from the center of my own living. God, what a gift to find myself, my life, my ache, my want, all here in your words.