To turn toward, to engage, to seek solace in community and our own inner strength.
the river the blood
the branches the trees
the blood the duck
the oil the goose
the sea the greed
the brief
the break
the decree
the one who held the key
grief broke the tree
so the oppressor could
never break the free
Copyright © 2026 by Marwa Helal. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 30, 2026, by the Academy of American Poets.
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
SPEAK, MEMORY—
Of the cunning hero,
The wanderer, blown off course time and again
After he plundered Troy’s sacred heights.
Born at Stratford, Essex, England, on July 28, 1844, Gerard Manley Hopkins
Wislawa Szymborska was a Polish poet whose work was widely translated into English. In 1996, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Jean Cocteau was born on July 5, 1889, in Maisons-Laffitte, near Paris.
John Ashbery was born in Rochester, New York, on July 28, 1927.
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