Women's Voices For Change

The poem speaks from the present, when climate disaster is incipient but not yet realized, when we still “did not know to fear” the sun. It poses images of lushness and life against those of aridity and death, allowing readers to draw their own inevitable conclusions about what we hope for our planet.

I chose “Dusk” by Tracy K. Smith for its frank expression of the double-edged sword that is motherhood (parenthood, really): We adore our children more than life itself, and if we do a good job of raising them, they one day will abandon us.

“The Path” may appear simple, but its ending moves me, every time. Fairy tale, love poem, ars poetica—“The Path” is all of these and more.

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.

“The Hill We Climb” by Amanda Gorman is an example of an occasional poem that exceeded itself by happening to be the perfect message at the perfect time and place, delivered by the perfect messenger.

Because this poem invites us to read it as metaphor, it was a short leap to consider the poem’s application to our country’s current political crisis, neither side really talking to the other, grievances swamping us like a ‘snowpocalypse.’

In 2020, the survival kit metaphor takes on other dimensions as we come to the end of a year that has felt relentless and full of sorrow.

Gwendolyn Brooks understood the power of one raised voice to fight oppression and to speak truth to power—and as a Black woman in America, she had a huge stake in the notion that “We are each other’s harvest.”