live simply, love madly, make magic.
New series, five things, on Fridays. Here’s a story. Back when I was in college, I had this professor. He was a wild-haired writer, a child of another era. He wore tweed blazers and drove a little sports car. He was the first person to teach me about poetry, really teach me I mean. On…
It’s been awhile since I “checked in” here on the blog. I’m always writing about the house, the garden, the babies — and I don’t often stop to update about me. Sure, all of those things are parts of me, but as a blog reader myself, I often wonder how the blogger herself is doing.…
Poetry Friday is a feature that I run once in awhile. A long time ago — before I was a mother, before I was a wife — I was a poet. Poetry was the thing that got me through many of my darkest hours. Once in awhile I like to share poems here, but only…
The Archipelago Of Kisses | Jeffrey McDaniel We live in a modern society. Husbands and wives don’t grow on trees, like in the old days. So where does one find love? When you’re sixteen it’s easy, like being unleashed with a credit card in a department store of kisses. There’s the first kiss. The sloppy…
Burning Oneself In | Adrienne Rich In a bookstore on the East Side I read a veteran’s testimony: the running down for no reason of an old woman in South Vietnam by a U.S. Army truck The heat-wave is over Lifeless, sunny, the East Side rests under its awnings Another summer The flames go on…
Another Poem About the Heart | Jenn Habel When the floor drops out, as it has now, you cannot hear the squirrel on the wire outside your window, the wheels spinning on the road below. You want only pity and are presented with the unbelievable effrontery of a world that moves on. But wait: this…
won’t you celebrate with me | Lucille Clifton won’t you celebrate with me what i have shaped into a kind of life? i had no model. born in babylon both nonwhite and woman what did i see to be except myself? i made it up here on this bridge between starshine and clay, my one…
Falling | Carl Phillips There’s a meadow I can’t stop coming back to, any more than I can stop calling it a sacred grove—isn’t that what it was, once? A lot of resonance, trees asway with declarations whose traced-on-the-air patterns the grasses also traced, more subtly, below. As for strangers: yes, and often, and—with few…