Women's Voices For Change

In these sometimes-painful poems, beauty is the balm that allows readers to understand what the speaker has experienced and to approach those experiences close-up but without getting overwhelmed.

You could call this poem an elegy to a lost mother, but I read it more universally as an elegy to the lost kingdom of childhood.

It will help, the poem seems to suggest, if we focus on family and the world of nature rather than the world of the human. Some aspects of that world are just too unbearable right now for a sustained gaze.

“Ink on Paper” seems to prioritize unarticulated feeling over rational thought and movement and communication over holding things tightly and trying to preserve  their physical manifestations.

Sometimes we rely on poetry as a sort of goad—to bear witness, expose evil or hypocrisy in others, or expose ourselves to ourselves.

One strength of today’s poem, though, is that it works even for readers not familiar with that infamous case involving a Stanford swimmer convicted of sexually assaulting an unconscious young woman behind a dumpster. Even before #metoo, sexual assaults like this are common enough, unfortunately, that readers will get the gist.

My father, a math and astronomy professor at a small university in the rural Midwest, taught me to look up and learn about the night sky.

The poem captures the relaxed, meandering qualities of still-light-at-night community meals in high summer. Community, family, plenty, gratitude—we feel all this in the poem, and understand the way ordinary experiences can sometimes transcend themselves.