Emily Dickinson, “I had no time to Hate” (478)
Right now in the United States, we worry. There was an election. One man won with millions more votes for him. The party opposing him did not fare terribly, gai...
Category: poetry
Wislawa Szymborska, “The Three Oddest Words”
Szymborska’s “The Three Oddest Words” haunts me. She speaks of three words—“Future,” “Silence,” and “Nothing”—which have a philosophical, world-historical grand...
Jane Hirshfield, “I sat in the sun”
“Draw not nigh hither,” says the Lord to Moses; “put off thy shoes from off they feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground” (Exodus, 3, 5). There...
Chase Twichell, “Animal Caution”
Memories of a certain significance entail grand gestures, rituals piled atop rituals. Every so often, Twichell climbs to a height where a cairn memorializing on...
Hannah VanderHart, “When Someone Says a Poem is Masterful”
Mastery, as VanderHart demonstrates, is an exceptionally cruel word. This did not need to be the case. However, hundreds of years of slavery and not nearly enou...