I’ve put up with too much, too long. And now I’m just too intelligent, too powerful, too beautiful, too sure of who I am finally to deserve anything less. –Sandra Cisneros
What She Said, April 27: Sandra Cisneros
What She Said, April 26: Rupi Kauer
how is it so easy for you to be kind to people he asked milk and honey dripped from my lips as I answered cause people have not been kind to me –Rupi Kaur
Turning into My Mother
The older I get, the more I feel my mother inhabiting my body. I’ve recently cut my hair in an attempt to gray gracefully, and when I look in the mirror, […]
Vaccinated
I’d rather place my bets on the medical community being right than thinking a wild virus that’s killed over half a million Americans is perfectly survivable.
What She Said, April 11: Muriel Rukeyser
If there were no poetry on any day in the world, poetry would be invented that day. For there would be an intolerable hunger. –Muriel Rukeyser
What She Said, April 10: Jane Hirshfield
Poetry’s work is the clarification and magnification of being. –Jane Hirshfield
What She Said, April 9: Rita Dove
If only the sun-drenched celebrities are being noticed and worshipped, then our children are going to have a rough time seeing the value in the shadows, where the thinkers, probers and scientists are keeping society together. –Rita Dove
National Poetry Month 2021: One Poem to Love
…We’ll float,
you said. Afterward
we’ll float between two worlds—
five bronze beetles
stacked like spoons in one
peony blossom, drugged by lust:
if I came back as a bird
I’d remember that—
until everyone we love
is safe is what you said.
What She Said, April 8: Naomi Shihab Nye
I do think that all of us think in poems. I think of a poem as being deeper than headline news. You know how they talk about breaking news all the time, that–if too much breaking news, trying to absorb all the breaking news, you start feeling really broken. And you need something that takes you to a place that’s a little more timeless, that kind of gives you a place to stand to look out at all these things. Otherwise you just feel assaulted by all the tragedy in the world. –Naomi Shihab Nye
What She Said, April 7: Jane Kenyon
The poet’s job is to put into words those feelings we all have that are so deep, so important, and yet so difficult to name, to tell the truth in such a beautiful way, that people cannot live without it. –Jane Kenyon
The Gloria Sirens 