Poetry Sunday columns this month will reprise previous features of black women poets and poems that take up questions of social justice.

"After revisiting what I knew about lynching, reading more about it, and growing increasingly depressed, I knew that I would write this poem as a heroic crown of sonnets..." —Marilyn Nelson

Through the use of fantastical elements and irony, the poem transforms into a strong negative commentary on what Yamini Pathak calls in her Poet’s Note “the traditional treatment of widows in Indian society.”

The poem makes its political point lightly, touching on it and then moving immediately into a lyricism that steers the poem back into more personal—and universal—concerns.

Ledger’s poems take stock of the losses—both personal to this speaker and in the larger sense of our world’s ever-diminishing resources and species—and do so with a mounting sense of crisis.

Maybe the best way we can all help now is to stay calm and focused on the goal of emerging from seclusion into a healthier climate in a few weeks or months. And, when we do go out or otherwise interact with others, to be kind and to treat everyone with an extra level of compassion and respect. That’s why “Small Kindnesses” is an important poem to feature this week.

In the poem, the speaker finds the confines of her small shelter-in-place space invaded by a visitor in the form of—an ant. But Jane Hirshfield takes the opposite view, welcoming the tiny creature into her home and then rescuing it to release it again outside.