A Poem for You: Kindness Naomi Shihab Nye - 1952- Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth. What you held in your hand, what you counted and carefully saved, all this must go so you know how desolate the landscape can be between the regions of kindness. How you ride and ride thinking the bus will never stop, the passengers eating maize and chicken will stare out the window forever. Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness you must travel where the Indian [...]

Prompt for the Week: 4/27/20 Write about the hands you know better than your own. (from @brooklynwriterscollective on Instagram)

A Poem for You: Testimony: 1968 by Rita Dove Who comforts you now that the wheel has broken? No more princes for the poor. Loss whittling you thin. Grief is the constant now, hope the last word spoken. In a dance of two elegies, which circles the drain? A token year with its daisies and carbines is where we begin. Who comforts you now? That the wheel has broken is Mechanics 101; to keep dreaming when the joke’s on you? Well, crazier legends have been written. Grief is the constant now; hope, the last word spoken on a motel balcony, shouted [...]

Prompt for the Week 4/13/20 “Caught in the rain today, I recall that couple kissing and holding each other infinitely close in the rain one dark evening under the nearly invisible trees,” wrote Paul Valéry in 1910, in a notebook included in The Idea of Perfection: The Poetry of Paul Valéry, translated from the French by Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody and forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux this month. Draw inspiration from rainy scenes in poetry such as William Carlos Williams’s “Spring Storm,” Sara Teasdale’s “There Will Come Soft Rains,” and Emily Dickinson’s “Like Rain it sounded till it curved” and write a poem [...]

Instructions on Not Giving Up Ada Limón - 1976- More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees that really gets to me. When all the shock of white and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath, the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin growing over whatever winter did to us, a return to the strange idea of continuous living despite the [...]