A note from our own Suzanne Wise: If you are choosing a poem for a dinner church service or looking for poems to read generally during our Season of Challenge, here are a few online resources for poetry that might be helpful. Poetry Foundation: poems of protest, resistance, and empowerment Academy of American Poets: social […]
By Wislawa Szymborska I believe in the great discovery. I believe in the man who will make the discovery. I believe in the fear of the man who will make the discovery. I believe in his face going white, His queasiness, his upper lip drenched in cold sweat. I believe in the burning of his […]
By Dean Young My poor students, all I ask of them is to grow antennae, lie down with lava and rise with snow, grow tongues from their math assignments and no, Melissa, your mother won’t approve of the bioluminescent smear on your communion dress. The world fidgets in uneasy relationship to our statements about it […]
by Sarah Kay If I should have a daughter…instead of “Mom,” she’s gonna call me “Point B.” Because that way, she knows that no matter what happens, at least she can always find her way to me. And I’m going to paint the solar system on the back of her hands so that she has […]
Still will I harvest beauty where it grows: In colored fungus and the spotted fog Surprised on foods forgotten; in ditch and bog Filmed brilliant with irregular rainbows Of rust and oil, where half a city throws Its empty tins; and in some spongy log Whence headlong leaps the oozy emerald frog. And a black […]
by Audre Lourde I However the image enters its force remains within my eyes rockstrewn caves where dragonfish evolve wild for life, relentless and acquisitive learning to survive where there is no food my eyes are always hungry and remembering however the image enters its force remains. A white woman stands bereft and empty a […]
by Alice Walker When they torture your mother plant a tree When they torture your father plant a tree When they torture your brother and your sister plant a tree When they assassinate your leaders and lovers plant a tree Whey they torture you too bad to talk plant a tree. When they begin to […]
by Czesław Miłosz Table I Only this table is certain. Heavy. Of massive wood. At which we are feasting as others have before us, Sensing under the varnish the touch of other fingers. Everything else is doubtful. We too, appearing For a moment in the guise of men or women (Why either-or?), in preordained dress. I […]
by Alice Walker Word reaches us that you are sleeping, sleeping. Dismayed we have turned to the sea. We encounter among others walking there a sense of what we have lost: the broad expanse of humanity’s sensitivity to the oneness of itself. Gabrielle, while you sleep, resting your nimble brain, we think of walking with […]
I. (from Leavings) After the bitter nights and the gray, cold days comes a bright afternoon. I go into the creek valley and there are the horses, the black and the white, lying in the warm shine on a bed of dry hay. They lie side by side, identically posed as a painter might imagine […]