Hello Leander, tucked into cloth, tiny lion
who yawns through the virus and tear gas.
You are a new scent of heat.
Before any scar grazes your legs
I would show you the rows of bicycles
in burned colors, and whistles and cardinals
who pin the cold snow. You hold a small
share of what it means to be here.
When the air shatters around you,
gold and marine, please know you belong.
You are half sky, half butterfly net, alive
to friends and strangers, fast to net
and trust. There is nothing
that is not worth much. Arrayed
in overalls and tackle-box, you should grow
to see the deep green rains, the roads
brushing the clouds. To compass
all you have done from a porch in late life
and listen to the bees who, woolen
and undeterred, have returned. I hope
you stay warm inside the white dusk of
morning. No one stays unscathed
but you have days of summer to grow
into your thoughts and learn the great
caring tasks. You have yards of treelight
to race through under the birds’ low song-
swept radiances. The trills you hear
are glass grace. They are singing.
Copyright © 2024 by Joanna Klink. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on April 8, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.
A Rock, A River, A Tree
Hosts to species long since departed,
Marked the mastodon,
The dinosaur, who left dried tokens
Of their sojourn here
On our planet floor,
Any broad alarm of their hastening doom
Is lost in the gloom of dust and ages.
But today, the Rock cries out to us, clearly, forcefully,
Come, you may stand upon my
Back and face your distant destiny,
But seek no haven in my shadow.
I will give you no hiding place down here.
You, created only a little lower than
The angels, have crouched too long in
The bruising darkness
Have lain too long
Face down in ignorance.
Your mouths spilling words
Armed for slaughter.
The Rock cries out to us today, you may stand upon me,
But do not hide your face.
Across the wall of the world,
A River sings a beautiful song. It says,
Come, rest here by my side.
Each of you, a bordered country,
Delicate and strangely made proud,
Yet thrusting perpetually under siege.
Your armed struggles for profit
Have left collars of waste upon
My shore, currents of debris upon my breast.
Yet today I call you to my riverside,
If you will study war no more. Come,
Clad in peace, and I will sing the songs
The Creator gave to me when I and the
Tree and the rock were one.
Before cynicism was a bloody sear across your
Brow and when you yet knew you still
Knew nothing.
The River sang and sings on.
There is a true yearning to respond to
The singing River and the wise Rock.
So say the Asian, the Hispanic, the Jew
The African, the Native American, the Sioux,
The Catholic, the Muslim, the French, the Greek
The Irish, the Rabbi, the Priest, the Sheik,
The Gay, the Straight, the Preacher,
The privileged, the homeless, the Teacher.
They hear. They all hear
The speaking of the Tree.
They hear the first and last of every Tree
Speak to humankind today. Come to me, here beside the River.
Plant yourself beside the River.
Each of you, descendant of some passed
On traveller, has been paid for.
You, who gave me my first name, you,
Pawnee, Apache, Seneca, you
Cherokee Nation, who rested with me, then
Forced on bloody feet,
Left me to the employment of
Other seekers—desperate for gain,
Starving for gold.
You, the Turk, the Arab, the Swede, the German, the Eskimo, the Scot,
You the Ashanti, the Yoruba, the Kru, bought,
Sold, stolen, arriving on the nightmare
Praying for a dream.
Here, root yourselves beside me.
I am that Tree planted by the River,
Which will not be moved.
I, the Rock, I the River, I the Tree
I am yours—your passages have been paid.
Lift up your faces, you have a piercing need
For this bright morning dawning for you.
History, despite its wrenching pain
Cannot be unlived, but if faced
With courage, need not be lived again.
Lift up your eyes upon
This day breaking for you.
Give birth again
To the dream.
Women, children, men,
Take it into the palms of your hands,
Mold it into the shape of your most
Private need. Sculpt it into
The image of your most public self.
Lift up your hearts
Each new hour holds new chances
For a new beginning.
Do not be wedded forever
To fear, yoked eternally
To brutishness.
The horizon leans forward,
Offering you space to place new steps of change.
Here, on the pulse of this fine day
You may have the courage
To look up and out and upon me, the
Rock, the River, the Tree, your country.
No less to Midas than the mendicant.
No less to you now than the mastodon then.
Here, on the pulse of this new day
You may have the grace to look up and out
And into your sister’s eyes, and into
Your brother’s face, your country
And say simply
Very simply
With hope—
Good morning.
"On the Pulse of Morning" from ON THE PULSE OF MORNING by Maya Angelou, copyright © 1993 by Maya Angelou. Used by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
—for Juan Antonio Corretjer and Consuelo Lee Tapia
In the photograph, the poet leans over to kiss his wife. He wears a black
suit and a black tie, as if there will be a ceremony and a medallion hung
around his neck. His hair is white and crowns the back of his head. Her hair
is white in waves. She lifts her face to kiss him through his white mustache.
This is a despedida. They are kissing goodbye. The charge is conspiracy again.
The officers born years after his first incarceration lead him away to Castillo
de Ponce. The officers lead her away to the women’s prison at Vega Alta.
The evidence is in the poetry. As the convoy of the empire’s army rumbles in
the dark, past the mountain town where one day they will be buried side by side,
the poet says to his beloved: Esta es pausa / para el amor. Es sólo / breve pausa.
The poet watches her sleep. This is a pause / for love. It’s only / a brief pause.
Copyright © 2024 by Martín Espada. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on April 23, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.
If the pain doesn’t come back,
what will I write about? Will the poems
have tendon and teeth? I didn’t get
right the sonnet of all its colors.
I did not find the exact dagger of phrase
about the long loss of my life.
Hope is all I do and am.
I don’t think I’m poet enough
to make you taste this mango;
or see that sutured sunset unless
from a hospital bed.
I was good for carving.
There will be kisses, music, street names.
Loved ones will go where the gone do.
What if I don’t want to (write it: can’t)
write about these things.
What if I would rather feel
than create feeling?
What then? Go ahead.
Copyright © 2024 by Liv Mammone. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 3, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.
Two years into anorexia recovery,
when I begin to miss dying more than ever,
my cat begins to hide.
She disappears for hours and I find her
hammocked in the lining of my couch.
She has hollowed it out with her teeth
and stares at me through cobwebbed eyes.
I am startled at my own anger.
After all the time and love I’ve given her,
I can’t forgive her turning away like this.
My partner reminds me that cats
do not know how to be cruel,
but they do know survival and fear.
Each day, I reach into the dark
mouth of the couch and pull her,
claws and all, back into life.
Weeks later, she dies with no one home.
I discover the body and the urge to blame
myself glows hot in my chest.
How could I let her die
in an empty house?
How could I be so cruel.
On the drive to donate her body,
my partner apologizes with every breath.
We pull over and he cries into my coat,
How could I let this happen?
And I know that if he feels guilty too,
maybe the blame belongs to neither of us.
This is the person who tried
to breathe life back into the cat’s corpse,
without realizing what he was doing.
He did it because his instincts told him to,
because every cell in his body is good.
For weeks, the memory will make him
shiver, gag, rinse the moment from his mouth.
This is the person who gave everything
to keep me alive, when letting me die
was the easiest thing to do.
He never stopped looking for me
when I hid in the hollows of myself and my heart
became a shadowy hallway of locked doors.
This is the person who, if I died
as the doctor said I would,
would surely blame himself,
and I would bang my phantom fists
against the plexiglass of the living world,
screaming No!
I did not die.
And when I was stuck in the hospital,
sobbing as I pictured him living our life alone,
I wrote him a letter asking how
he could ever forgive me.
He wrote back saying I would
rather miss you for a while
than miss you forever.
In the car now, he asks how
we’ll ever survive this
and I say Together.
Copyright © 2024 by Nen G. Ramirez. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 11, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.
I built an unnamed altar in my heart,
And sculptured sacred garlands for a frieze
From delicately petalled memories,—
The fragrance of a word, the fragile art
Of ash-gold hair, dim visioned things that start
With radiant wings from mist of reveries,
And vanish at the telling as a breeze
Blurs mirrored stars in dark pools set apart.
But, as I worshiped reverently there
The symbols of the beautiful, there came
A light aslant the shadows of my prayer
That silenced mine uplifted lips with shame.
The garlands coldly carven in that fair
Unmeaning tracery enscrolled—thy name.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on July 14, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.
I like to stand right still awhile
Beside some forest pool.
The reeds around it smell so fresh,
The waters look so cool!
Sometimes I just hop in and wade,
And have a lot of fun,
Playing with bugs that dart across
The water in the sun.
They lodge here at this little pool—
All sorts of bugs and things
That hop about its shady banks,
Or dart along with wings,
Or scamper on the water top,
As water-striders go,
Or strange back-swimmers upside down,
Using their legs to row,
Or the stiff, flashing dragon flies,
The gentle damoiselle,
The clumsy, sturdy water-bugs,
And scorpions as well,
That come on top to get fresh air
From homes beneath the pool,
Where water-boatmen have their nooks,
On pebbles, as a rule.
And then, behold! Kingfisher comes,
That great big royal bird!
To him what is the dragon fly
That kept the pool life stirred?
Or water-tigers terrible
That murder bugs all day?
Kingfisher comes, and each of these
Would hide itself away!
He swoops and swallows what he will,
A stone-fly or a frog.
Wing’d things rush frightened through the air,
Others to hole and log.
The little pool that held them all
I watch grow very bare,
But fisher knows his hide and seek—
He’ll find some one somewhere!
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on July 27, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.
There is no silence lovelier than the one
That flowers upon a flowering tree at night.
There is no silence known beneath the sun
That is so strange to bear, nor half so white.
If I had all that silence in my heart,
What yet unfinished heavens I could sing!
My words lift up and tremble to depart,
Then die in air, from too much uttering.
It must have been beneath a tree like this
An angel sought a girl in Galilee,
While she looked up and pondered how the kiss
Of God had come with wings and mystery.
It may be that a single petal fell.
Heavy with sorrow that it could not tell.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on August 4, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.
We are preparing for the wrong disaster. —Chris Begley, The Next Apocalypse
The year I was born, the Soviet Union’s
early warning radar system malfunctioned,
reporting five intercontinental ballistic
missiles in flight: a preemptive nuclear
strike. You may have heard this story.
How a single lieutenant colonel dismissed
the signal as the false alarm that it was …
but had he made a different call
in that moment? Had he seen those five
ghost fingers as a fist? A mushroom cloud:
the most dangerous cliché. I hold it
in my hands on my fortieth birthday and
it becomes a bouquet: a thousand stems
leading to a thousand worlds in which cooler
heads did not prevail, to a thousand
alternate universe versions of me, born
in the year of the apocalypse. I see myself …
dead via radiation poisoning. Dead via
the shutdown of the supply chain, the failure
of the water system, the reemergence
of previously preventable diseases. Dead
in such manly ways: via an unlucky fall
in a fistfight over nothing. Via a scratch,
ignored and infected. I plucked petals, looking
for a version of me who survives. Hoping
to find that … you know: leather jacket,
black motorcycle, katana strapped to my back
version. That warrior poet, lone vessel of
vengeance, keeping the wasteland’s unending
tide of razor-clawed mutants at bay version.
All these dead worlds, and he isn’t out there.
All these visions of who I could have been,
and not a single hero: folk, super, anti
or otherwise. In one life, I wore a suit of armor
and drowned in the river. In one life, I hoarded
food and choked on it. In one life, the basement
was so full of boxes of bullets—a tornado came
and I had nowhere to go. No shelter. I emptied
clip after clip into the wind. All these dead
worlds, and we tell the same stories.
Which is not to say that I never survive. Just
that my survival, in every reality where it is
possible, never belongs to me. I see myself:
forty. Not a dual-wielding bandit warlord. Just a
neighbor, sitting in another endless community
meeting. And how many of our ancestors have
already taught us: even after the world ends,
there is work to do. I see myself in that work: not
the leader, not a lone wolf, just another part of the
pack. Because in every universe in which
I am alive, it is because of other people. And I
don’t always like them, but I love them. In every
universe in which I am alive, it is less because I
could fight, and more because I could
forgive. Because I could cooperate. Because
I could apologize. Because I could dance. Because
I could grow pumpkins in my backyard and leave
them at my neighbor’s door, asking for nothing in
return. In every universe in which I am alive, I am
holding: a first aid kit, a solar panel, a sleeping
cat. Never a rusty battle ax or rocket launcher—
sure, maybe sometimes a chainsaw, but only for
firewood. I am holding: a cooking pot, a teddy bear,
a photo album, a basketball, a bouquet of flowers.
Survival is not a fortress. It is a garden.
Survival is not a siren. It is a symphony. And
yeah, we fight for it sometimes, but survival is not
the fight. It is the healing after: the soft hum of
someone you trust applying the bandage, the
feeling of falling asleep in a safe place.
Copyright © 2024 by Kyle Tran Myhre. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 6, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.
I
Thou winged symbol of the quiet mind,
Thou straying violet, flying flower of spring,
Heaven-hued and heaven-hearted! Thou dost sing
As thou some sweet remembered thought didst find,
And, counseling with thyself in musing kind,
Didst softly say it over. Thy swift wing
Knows but a quiet rhythm; thou a thing
Of peace, to passion innocently blind.
Thy russet breast means married love, long hope,
Sheltered experience, small and sweet and sure.
All of the brown earth’s natural purity;
But something heavenly, beyond our scope,
Steeped thy blue wing in color strange and pure,
Intense and holy as the mirrored sky.
II
Pulse of the gorgeous world, jubilant, strong,—
Thy song a whistled splendor, and thy coat
A fiery song! From thy triumphant throat
How I have heard it pouring, loud and long.
Whipping the air as with a scarlet thong—
The joyous lashing of thy triple note
Which all the tamer noonday noises smote
And clove a royal pathway through the throng!
Thou singest joy of battle, joy of fame.
Glory, and love of woman; joy of strife
With life’s wild fates; and scorn’st, with jocund breath
For prudence’ sake to dim thy feathered flame—
Thou heart of fire, epitome of life,
Full-throated flouter of vindictive death!
III
And lo, among the leafy, hidden groves
Within my heart, they both do flit and nest,
Saintly blue wing and vaunting scarlet crest,
Yea, all of life and all its myriad loves.
Even as Nature holds them, sifts and proves
And balances, so shall my soul find rest
In Her large tolerance, which without rest
Or lagging, toward some wide conclusion moves.
So, though I weary sometimes of the stress,
Leave me not, little lovers of the air.
Dearest of Nature’s fine antitheses!
Thou of the musing voice and heavenly dress.
Thou, royal firebrand,—neither could I spare.
My scarlet Passion, nor my winged Peace!
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on August 10, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.
When the spent sun throws up its rays on cloud
And goes down burning into the gulf below,
No voice in nature is heard to cry aloud
At what has happened. Birds, at least, must know
It is the change to darkness in the sky.
Murmuring something quiet in its breast,
One bird begins to close a faded eye;
Or overtaken too far from its nest,
Hurrying low above the grove, some waif
Swoops just in time to his remembered tree.
At most he thinks or twitters softly, “Safe!
Now let the night be dark for all of me.
Let the night be too dark for me to see
Into the future. Let what will be be.”
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on August 11, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.
I imagined her
stretched out and weeping
over her womb on a stretcher,
shaking. scared. steadily,
whispering her wants to her wished
as the ambulance whisked
through the dark of morning.
The son had not come yet.
When I arrived
my sister lay, covered in blues,
body bound to the hospital bed,
belly big with life still living.
water, just about to burst,
she beckoned my hand.
I stood beside a gripping moment,
hard to grasp. her
pushing while pulling,
my nephew’s heartbeat
like surround sound
bouncing through all the silence
on our tongues. some bodies, stood
still like statues—hard to feel.
once his heart stopped, it was cold.
and lifeless.
my nephew was born.
after dying. in the maternity ward
at St. John’s hospital. my mother
tucked his itty bitty brown body
tightly into a purple blanket,
placed him gently into my sister’s arms,
and I cried
as if there was no sun in the room.
Copyright © 2024 by Tish Jones. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 13, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.
I did not run away
I walked away by daylight
—Sojourner Truth
The hour I ran out
on my bondage I
didn’t run.
The sun was
Shining in its
Sunday’s best,
beating its coat
on my coat. This
heat produced my
sweat, not swift
feet. My haircut,
new. & my hat
wore ribbons
fit a church
frontrow. A day so
ordinary who could
guess
what I walked
away from? How
could I be anyone
but me,
with my name in
my teeth? My feet
gliding under each
detective’s lowered
brim. The bounty
on my head
higher than hawk
circles.
The night I walked
out on my master
is when I learned
I was serving one.
The same molar
chiding my cheeks
a mole engorging
silence. My first
spy the dream in
my
brain entrenching
ownership. I spent
12,000 treks
thinking my
moves were my
own until I found
road stretching out
of a forest I hadn’t
even seen grow.
When I arrived
at the brush &
flatland I knew
where I had been
had not been mine,
but a life for my
first love. The first
who gave my
selfness a ceiling.
How could I have
not chosen my
maker before
choosing myself?
The night I walked
out on my master
wasn’t night
at all. Freedom
made the day
ordinary in a new
way. How for a
fish water is never
new, just a change
between bodies.
But if a child
exits
my chute gravity is
law, & down
becomes a
direction.
The first time my
feet touched floor I
learned the bottom.
After,
I took my legs &
forged a path
between a past &
Jupiter.
Now time can’t
touch me & I’m
where water is
always fresh
though it pains like
we do. Where pine
trees grow w/ no
hunting season is
where I am headed.
A compass w/ no
map is the stars.
Find your way. If I
told you the
address
It wouldn’t be a
secret.
Copyright © 2024 by Nabila Lovelace. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 14, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.
On August 2, 2010, siblings and cousins Takeitha Warner, 13; JaMarcus Warner, 14; JaTavious Warner, 17; Litrelle Stewart, 18; LaDarius Stewart, 17; and Latevin Stewart, 15, drowned in the Red River in Shreveport, Louisiana in attempt to save DeKendrix Warner, 15, who was rescued.
One of they own was down in the belly of the river, so The Six dove and flew, neither flippered nor winged, as if air could hold them, as if riverwater was sweet.
The children believed in miracles, believed they was miracles, believed life was not life without they people.
Somebody said they was searching for stars but looked down into them waves. The stars they perceived was brother, sister, cousin, each eye shining with rivermud studded with gemstone, each mouth open and gleaming with tooth, gold, child-holler.
So, they did what humans do when they fall in love: fall. Flung they bodies in full panic, full surrender, one after another after another after another after another, one behind the other, into riverwater—We blood in life, blood in death, ain’t we, Blood?—drowned as one sound.
Water was neither translucent nor transparent, which means not one could read their futures, which were dying as they dove, dying as their limbs did not heed the love-command of they individual hearts to stroke and live, stroke and live, but stroke they did, stroke they did.
Ingested riverwater
like shine—mud, sediment, sludge—
they blues turned mouth,
part holy, part tomb:
Kin, when you go, I go.
We bout to die soon.
Copyright © 2024 by Tameka Cage Conley. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 15, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.
I repeat “dead” aloud enough times for its meaning to loosen
from sense. Once the word I repeat is no longer comprehensible,
it begins to attack everything else I know.
Giorgio Agamben says devastation is one face of a Genius
that exists inside us. The other face is creation.
The two sounds that begin and end “dead” echo in my ears.
Then a third appears between them. The middle sound, between
the coronal plosives of the letter d, is the ghost.
Agamben tells us that the Genius is within us only as long if
we realize it does not belong to us. Just as existence does not.
Now I begin to voice only the ghost, and watch it ‘not appear.’
Is the narrow space between my Genius’s two faces
where that ghost lives? When I listen for what will not appear,
I hear my own voicelessness amplify.
My hearing is most acute when I’m naked
in front of the bedroom mirror.
I want voicelessness to create an echoing hollow
inside every word I type.
I feel how listening to find disappearances makes my nipples erect.
Disappearance is my new self-seduction.
Copyright © 2024 by Rusty Morrison. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on September 2, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.
Eyes damper than before I hate EGOS.
More THAN People
More THAN Cars
I hate people
like how an ant hill does
that’s at the bottom of the stairs
I hate silver ears
quick to listen but never want to hear
never want to here
I MUST SPEAK SO LOUDLY TO YOU
I mustn’t burden your thoughts any longer
I mustn’t hesitate to ask for space
because honestly it’s killing me
backing me up in balance
where I can’t stand to fall
placing deep deep trenches
inside of me
I HAVE NEVER BEEN WHOLE
Never stop to glorify
my art and assets
I’ll hold my tongue in place
a hole in my Pace
my words rotting my breath
biting my lips in the face of adversity
I am that anthill.
Deeply woven and dug into ground
without even a shovel or spade
I wish I had more GRIT
more GRIT to say I’m tired
of being
an ant hill
under your boot
anticipating the thunder between each step before
I feel your soles coming to crush my foundation
more GRIT to say
I may be small
but damn I want a house
a condo a mansion
one my tiny body can ache
after reaching the top of the staircase
I want a house that says home on the outside
and smells like one on the inside.
I want to be a person.
Treated, looked at, and cared for
LIKE ONE WOULD A PERSON.
cared for like when you don’t step on that….
It took years for your mother to leave the abuse
EGOS weighing down on your mother’s spine
her calcium tilting her crown
she only looks up at her king
it’ll break your mama’s back the way she cares for you like that.
Through her eyes;
This Anthill Is Best She’s Got!
And no matter how many soles break the foundation
she’s rebuilt this anthill for you.
So you can one day be
the corporal ant in charge
conducting the search for Life,
the meaning of curiosity.
Be that corporal ant in the cupboard
leading the way along.
All along your mother trying to
piece together her anthill
in the back of the line.
I am that anthill smooshed and spread so thin.
striving to be that mansion
to be the best and biggest version of myself
the version of myself that has grit
my Foundation has never been solid
it is a fact I’ve come to accept.
My anthill blooms between the crevices
of the east side
slightly tilted from childhood
My anthill was always dug up,
pranced apun,
fried,
drowned,
leaked,
stomped, choked,
before I had the awareness
The sun beamin’ on my skin
slowly adding September to my width and my anthill
My thoughts, creations, and vibrations,
carrying little pieces of earth
to the surface to birth me.
A sliver of sunlight touches my pupils every time
A piece of thought flows
in and out
I am burying so deep but it’s never deep enough
I can barely scratch the surface
before I get close to my mother
Swallow me up again
maybe
if I dig deep enough My Foundation
will not only be My Sanctuary
maybe
I could hear mother’s gentle song
while I drift into sleep and play
Copyright © 2024 by AluTru Kayla Steward. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 29, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.
My mother swapped prayer for sharp screams when my
sister crowned. The epidural settled
on one side until the nerves in her left
hip became stars, dying down the dark of
her thigh. At 17, I watched a girl-
child emerge covered in only-God-can-
name. Maybe, blood-light. Star-vein. Water-
sky. A boneless sea creature who knows some-
thing about the universe sitting next
to ours. I don’t want to go back nor do
I want to die this way—making daughters.
My body has a tenure of chaos
and blood. It’s clotting and ache began at
the edge of girlhood. I see no way out.
Copyright © 2024 by Ajanaé Dawkins. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 16, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.
And if my heart be scarred and burned,
The safer, I, for all I learned;
The calmer, I, to see it true
That ways of love are never new—
The love that sets you daft and dazed
Is every love that ever blazed;
The happier, I, to fathom this:
A kiss is every other kiss.
The reckless vow, the lovely name,
When Helen walked, were spoke the same;
The weighted breast, the grinding woe,
When Phaon fled, were ever so.
Oh, it is sure as it is sad
That any lad is every lad,
And what’s a girl, to dare implore
Her dear be hers forevermore?
Though he be tried and he be bold,
And swearing death should he be cold,
He’ll run the path the others went.…
But you, my sweet, are different.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on August 17, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.