Today’s is a love poem for everyone and a model for how to love expansively and wholly. It embraces us and loves us for who we are and what we do, and its range allows each of us to feel seen and recognized.

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.

I wrote this poem to be included in a tribute volume for Marvin Bell, who died last month at 83. “Dead Woman Poem for Marvin Bell” honors him as an exceptional teacher of poetry and also purloins his invented form—what he called his Dead Man poems. —Susan Cohen

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.’

“Thoughts” strikes me as a perfect poem to consider around the end of one year or the beginning of another as we take stock of what has come to pass, and make plans and resolutions for the future.

In “America, I Sing You Back,” to frame America as a child who makes mistakes “as any child might do” is ultimately to offer the possibility of redemption and restoration.