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    Healing the Divide: Poems of Kindness and Connection
    Healing the Divide: Poems of Kindness and Connection
    Healing the Divide: Poems of Kindness and Connection
    Ebook165 pages1 hour

    Healing the Divide: Poems of Kindness and Connection

    By Green Writers Press

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    About this ebook

    This anthology features poems by Mark Doty, Ross Gay, Donald Hall, Marie Howe, Naomi Shihab Nye and many others. These poets, from all walks of life, and from all over America, prove to us the possibility of creating in our lives what Dr. Martin Luther King called the "beloved community," a place where we see each other as the neighbors we already are. Healing the Divide urges us, at this fraught political time, to move past the negativity that often fills the airwaves, and to embrace the ordinary moments of kindness and connection that fill our days.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGreen Writers Press
    Release dateJun 28, 2020
    ISBN9781950584611
    Healing the Divide: Poems of Kindness and Connection

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    • 4/5
      In these days of anxiety and uncertainty, this book soothes and reassures. After an insightful introduction by Ted Kooser, James Crews brings together poets who encourage connection, harmony, compassion. It didn’t hurt that the work is by some of my favorite people, including Barbara Crooker, Donald Hall, Jane Kenyon, Dorianne Laux (whose “Mother’s Day” left such an impression on me), W.S. Merwin (how I want to emulate his gift), and Connie Wanek (if you haven’t read her Consider the Lilies: Mrs. God Poems, do so!). I also discovered new poets (who are not new, but new to me): Mary Elder Jacobsen. You can’t go wrong with a turtle poem! I, too, am “mesmerized by a moving shell.”Alison Luterman. Her “I Confess” made me smile after a stressful day.Danusha Laméris. “Small Kindnesses” was perhaps my favorite of the collection.So many moments of joy and simple pleasures fill these pages. I’ll be re-reading it often.

    Book preview

    Healing the Divide - Green Writers Press

    Copyright © 2019 James Crews

    All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without written permission except in the case of brief quotations included in critical articles and reviews.

    Printed in the United States

    10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

    Green Writers Press is a Vermont-based publisher whose mission is to spread a message of hope and renewal through the words and images we publish. Throughout we will adhere to our commitment to preserving and protecting the natural resources of the earth. To that end, a percentage of our proceeds will be donated to environmental activist groups. Green Writers Press gratefully acknowledges support from individual donors, friends, and readers to help support the environment and our publishing initiative.

    Giving Voice to Writers & Artists Who Will Make the World a Better Place

    Green Writers Press | Brattleboro, Vermont

    www.greenwriterspress.com

    ISBN: 978-1-7327434-5-8

    THE PAPER USED IN THIS PUBLICATION IS PRODUCED BY MILLS COMMITTED TO RESPONSIBLE AND SUSTAINABLE FORESTRY PRACTICES.

    For my husband, Brad Peacock, who teaches me daily what it means to be a kinder and more connected human being.

    Your neighbor is your other self dwelling behind a wall. In understanding, all walls shall fall down.

    —KAHLIL GIBRAN

    CONTENTS

    Preface

    Introduction

    THE WORD THAT IS A PRAYER | Ellery Akers

    OUT OF THE MIST | Lahab Assef Al-Jundi

    MENDING | David Axelrod

    SNOWFLAKE | William Baer

    GATE C22 | Ellen Bass

    SWIMMING IN THE RAIN | Chana Bloch

    MY DAUGHTER’S HAIR | Megan Buchanan

    BLESSING THE BOATS | Lucille Clifton

    REVISIT | Carol Cone

    TELLING MY FATHER | James Crews

    LISTEN, | Barbara Crooker

    GLITTER | Dede Cummings

    IN MEMORIAM | Leo Dangel

    THE LAST TIME MY MOTHER LAY DOWN WITH MY FATHER | Todd Davis

    APPARITION | Mark Doty

    PASTORAL | Rita Dove

    THEY DANCE THROUGH GRANELLI’S | Pat Hemphill Emile

    FUND DRIVE | Terri Kirby Erickson

    LOVE POEM | Alan Feldman

    WINTER SUN | Molly Fisk

    ABLUTION | Amy Fleury

    NEONATAL ICU PRAYER | Laura Foley

    SQUIRREL, RESCUE | Patricia Fontaine

    ABEYANCE | Rebecca Foust

    AUGUST MORNING | Albert Garcia

    A SMALL NEEDFUL FACT | Ross Gay

    END RESULTS | Alice Wolf Gilborn

    MARRIAGE | Dan Gerber

    SUMMER MOWING | Jennifer Gray

    SLEEPING WITH THE CHIHUAHUA | Tami Haaland

    SUMMER KITCHEN | Donald Hall

    REMEMBER | Joy Harjo

    A DRINK OF WATER | Jeffrey Harrison

    WHEN I TAUGHT HER HOW TO TIE HER SHOES | Penny Harter

    KNITTING PATTERN | Margaret Hasse

    PLANTING PEAS | Linda Hasselstrom

    SOAKING UP SUN | Tom Hennen

    BOWL | Jane Hirshfield

    TO BE HELD | Linda Hogan

    THE KISS | Marie Howe

    LIFTING MY DAUGHTER | Joseph Hutchison

    TAKING A WALK BEFORE MY SON’S 18TH BIRTHDAY | Mary Elder Jacobsen

    INUKSHUK | Rob Jacques

    AFTER DISAPPOINTMENT | Mark Jarman

    CLAIM | Kasey Jueds

    BEFORE DAWN IN OCTOBER | Julia Kasdorf

    OTHERWISE | Jane Kenyon

    YEARS LATER, WASHING DISHES, A VISION | Christine Kitano

    LILY | Ron Koertge

    THOSE SUMMER EVENINGS | Ted Kooser

    SMALL KINDNESSES | Danusha Laméris

    AFTER YOU GET UP EARLY ON MEMORIAL DAY | Susanna Lang

    MOTHER’S DAY | Dorianne Laux

    I ASK MY MOTHER TO SING | Li-Young Lee

    BREAD | Richard Levine

    THE HUNDRED NAMES OF LOVE | Annie Lighthart

    FOR THE LOVE OF AVOCADOS | Diane Lockward

    I CONFESS | Alison Luterman

    WAVING GOODBYE | Wesley McNair

    TO PAULA IN LATE SPRING | W.S. Merwin

    LOVE PIRATES | Joseph Millar

    WINTER POEM | Frederick Morgan

    ON BEING HERE | Travis Mossotti

    EVERYDAY GRACE | Stella Nesanovich

    SHOULDERS | Naomi Shihab Nye

    NAMING THE WAVES | Alison Prine

    WE ARE OF A TRIBE | Alberto Ríos

    SUNDAY MORNING EARLY | David Romtvedt

    FOR MY DAUGHTER | Marjorie Saiser

    SIGHT | Faith Shearin

    MOTHER TALKS BACK TO THE MONSTER | Carrie Shipers

    TOKYO, NEAR UENO STATION | Julia Shipley

    KINDNESS | Anya Silver

    BEATIFIC | Tracy K. Smith

    TRUST | Thomas R. Smith

    FORECAST | Bruce Snider

    TWO ARAB MEN | Kim Stafford

    THE WAY IT IS | William Stafford

    EMPATH | Heather Swan

    NIGHT FISHING WITH POPPIE | Sam Temple

    FOR YOU I’LL FLY | Carmen Tafolla

    SEWING | Sue Ellen Thompson

    GATHERING | Natasha Trethewey

    PRESERVES | Natalia Treviño

    DOWLING GARDENS | Connie Wanek

    LETTER TO MY HUSBAND FAR AWAY | Gillian Wegener

    WITH YOU | Michelle Wiegers

    COMPASSION | Miller Williams

    About the Poets

    Credits

    Acknowledgments

    PREFACE

    UNABASHED ENTHUSIASM is the glue that holds good anthologies together, and the book now in your hands will, as you page through it poem after poem, show you its editor’s enthusiasms. What breathes from these pages is kindness and tenderness, qualities especially attractive and necessary at a time when warmth and tolerance and inclusion are rare qualities. Nothing, wrote Tolstoy, can make our life, or the lives of other people, more beautiful than perpetual kindness, and here before you is a book of kindness, of multiple kindnesses.

    I learned about poetry—what it looked like and how good it could make me feel—from the anthologies used by two of my teachers, one in junior high and one in high school. Of course my classmates and I made fun of those teachers’ enthusiasm when their backs were turned, we being too cool for displays of emotion, but what poetry could make me feel stuck with me, and I’ve been reading poems and trying to write poetry ever since, poems every morning when I get up, poems off and on through the day and into the evening. Poetry has been at the center of my life and my attention for more than sixty years.

    In my personal library I have around 350 anthologies, a couple of which I’ve edited myself. I love them, such an efficient means for finding beautiful and moving poems. The wrecks and fender-benders in nearly every individual poet’s books have been pushed off onto the shoulder, leaving only the poems still capable of taking us somewhere, often somewhere familiar but as seen through a windshield, clean and unmarked by even so much as a rock chip.

    Every anthology, too, is an argument for something, an act of persuasion, and this one is no exception. It says to us, what if instead of watching the evening news we were to watch a young man take a drink from a running tap, then wipe his cheek with the sleeve of his shirt? Or see described in words and images a woman giving her invalid father a bath, rinsing the thin hair over his sutured skull. Or what if we just throw open the windows and let in the clean light of every one of these poems? At least for those minutes, or so it seems to me, we’d see the world as a richer, more meaningful, a kinder and more tender place.

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