Reading Time: 3 minutes In 1905, Franz Xaver Kappus wrote to the famous German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, asking him to look over his own poems. Rilke responded with a letter that would begin a years-long correspondence. These letters were so significant, so important to Kappas, that he had ten of them published as a book. In the intervening years, that […]
poetry
Posted inHistory
On the brink: How yesterday’s fears can help us move through today’s war
Reading Time: 9 minutes In 1919, a poet started drafting what would eventually become one of our most oft-quoted poems, especially in times of struggle and disaster. In its earlier forms, it referenced tensions on the Russian border, before being scrubbed of precise details and left with a more all-encompassing sense of dread. As the poet was writing it, […]
Posted inMeaning & Purpose
On ‘tomorrow sorrow’: How we grieve the future today
Reading Time: 7 minutes I was six years old when Star Trek: The Next Generation first aired one of its most beloved episodes, “The Inner Light.” In it, Captain Jean-Luc Picard wakes to a life not his own. He lives in a small village, where he works as an iron weaver, and everyone explains that he is recovering from […]
Posted inDeath & Dying
On the deaths of Catherine and Noel, age three
Reading Time: 9 minutes In the middle of a trip to England, in the middle of a Lake District hike, I found myself in the village of Grasmere, “the loveliest spot that man hath ever found,” according to the poet William Wordsworth, who lived there. It wasn’t as small as I’d thought it would be. I looked up the […]
Posted inPoetry
Eve
Reading Time: 2 minutes You probably know of me But you don’t know me I’m the lion waiting in the den The mystical life force that beckons forth, A line of salamanders and amphibians All morphed together to form me Your queen Truth is I existed only as plot, An evil necessary, If females were not needed for reproduction, […]
Posted inPoetry
Heartbroken
Reading Time: < 1 minute How can I teach when I am heartbroken? When my throat clenches,when my words flee, when my eyes blur,how am I to softly composethoughts into images,dreams into documents? My fingers knit over one another:nails picked to shards,skin wan, hands trembling,a rasp of calluses and dry patches,a susurration of nerves. You wouldn’t knowthat my hands bleed in […]
Posted inPoetry
We’ve got everything here
Reading Time: < 1 minute We’ve got meds for your head when the going gets tough We’ve got taurine in cans when caffeine’s not enough. We’ve got porno and politics, cartoons and stuff So you don’t have to think when you’re down in the dumps Now this little pill, you can take when you’re ill And it makes you feel better like that And we’ve got plenty more for when you […]
Posted inPoetry
Winter
Reading Time: < 1 minute Each year winter takes my hands:I imagine them, bundled off to becomeA wreath to adorn the season’s front door.My hands, red and crackled with eczema,Nestle against a stranger’s hands,Curled tight with tendonitis.Raynaud’s colors the next pair over(blue and purple, due to the cold)While arthritis coils the next pairPainfully inward, inward.No shoveling snow for me,Nor washing […]
Posted inPoetry
The last animists
Reading Time: < 1 minute They say we have woken From a long night of magic, Of cravings, Fire for fire, earth for earth. A wind springs up. The birds stir in the dovecotes. It is so clear in this cold light That the firmament turns without music, That when the stars forge The atoms of our being No smith […]
Posted inPoetry
Returning to camp
Reading Time: < 1 minute I have gone among those rutting Stamping wind-blown men Out on the fields of heat. I have felt their voices hammer Like the stone axe, Felt what it is to feel The need of ligament To arc the body as a bow, Unsheaf the bones And send them flying Hard into the haunch of space. […]