Perhaps there’s a kind of afterlife that is made up of our memories of a departed person, especially as these cling to that person’s belongings. Bruce Snider, who lives and teaches in California, suggests that here.
One of the most distinctive sounds in small-town America is the chiming of horseshoe pitching. A friend always carries a pair in the trunk of his car.
There are many fine poems in which the poet looks deeply into a photograph and tries to touch the lives caught there. Here’s one by Tami Haaland, who lives in Montana.
Draped in towels,
my grandmother sits in a hard-backed
chair, a white bowl
Our sense of smell is the one sense most likely to transport us through time.
Here’s a delightful poem by Douglas S. Jones about a bicycle rider sharing his bike with a spider. Jones lives in Michigan and spiders live just about everywhere
It’s the time of the year for school supplies, and here’s a poem by Daniel J. Langton about just one of the items you’ll need to pick up. Langton lives in San Francisco.
One of my favorite poems is by Ruth Stone, about eating at a McDonald’s, and I have myself written a poem about a lunch at Arby’s.
I am very fond of poems that don’t use more words than they have to. They’re easier to carry around in your memory.
Sometimes, when we are children, someone or something suddenly throws open a window and the world of adults pours in. And we never quite get over it. Here’s a poem about an experience like that by Judith Slater, who lives in New York.
Jane Hirshfield, who lives in the San Francisco Bay area, is one of our country’s finest poets, and I have never seen a poem of hers that I didn’t admire. Here’s a fine one that I see as being about our inability to control the world beyond us.
I’d guess that many of you have looked at old snapshots taken of you by doting relatives and tried to recall what it was like to be that person in the picture who seems to be you yet is such a stranger today.
I have irises that have been handed down through my family over the generations, being dug up again and again, moved to another house, another garden. Here’s a poem about that sort of inheritance, by Debra Wierenga, who lives in Michigan.
