Editor’s Note: Love always seems to find a way in, no matter what the external circumstances, making even the end of the world seem something one could acclimate to if the right person were beside you. Since post-apocalypse movies seem to be so popular these days, I thought I’d share this poem of love in the time of an imagined post-apocalypse. 

Love Poem for an Apocalypse

I wish I’d met you after everything had burned,
after the markets crash and global sea levels rise.
The forests scorched. The grasslands trespassed.
My love, it is a whole life’s work to disappear—
ask the god with his head in the wolf’s mouth or
the serpent intent on swallowing all the earth.
Ask the senate subcommittee for market solutions
for late capitalism and early-onset dementia.

You and a bird flu could make me believe in fate.
I think we might be happy in the end, in the dark
of a hollow tree, a seed bank or blast-proof bunker,
if only you would sing the song I love, you know
the one about our precious eschatology, the one
I always ask to hear to lull me back to sleep.

Dave Lucas is an American poet born in Cleveland, Ohio. He is the author of Weather (University of Georgia Press, 2011) which was awarded the 2012 Ohioana Book Award for Poetry. He is the recipient of a Henry Hoyns Fellowship from the University of Virginia and a Discovery/The Nation Prize in 2005, and his poems have appeared in many journals including Poetry Magazine, Slate, Blackbird, The Paris Review, The Threepenny Review and Virginia Quarterly Review. He was the second Poet Laureate of the state of Ohio from 2018 to 2019. He received his B.A. at John Carroll University, M.F.A. in creative writing at the University of Virginia, and M.A. and Ph.D. in English language and literature at the University of Michigan. This poem is posted here with permission of the author.

Editor’s Note: As if in response to last week’s Binsey Poplars poem and our not knowing “what we do when we delve or hew,” this prose poem recounts a historic event detailing the consequences of our rapacious “hewing.”   

LOGJAM
               The 1883 logjam on Michigan’s Grand River
was one of the biggest in the history of logging.

Listen: one hundred fifty million feet of logs: skew and splinter thirty feet high for seven river-miles. Sky of only lightning, mouth of only teeth, all bite and churn, thrust and
spear, the kind of mess made by men who have men to clean up their messes. It rains. Thirty-seven million tons of white pine clears its throat. Water rises. The bridges will go
soon. Listen closely: underneath the knock and clatter, the trees still sing. The song is a violence.

Amorak Huey is author of four books of poems including Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy (Sundress Publications, 2021). Co-founder with Han VanderHart of River River Books, Huey teaches in the BFA and MFA programs at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. He also is co-author with W. Todd Kaneko of the textbook Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury, 2nd ed., 2024) and Slash/Slash (2021), winner of the Diode Editions Chapbook Prize. Huey is a recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts, and his poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry, American Poetry Review, The Southern Review, The Missouri Review, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day series, and many other print and online journals.

Editor’s Note: The poet’s exquisite, strangely beautiful language and artful rhyme amplify his feelings of despair at losing a treasured and unique stand of aspens. His message is even more pertinent today, when instead of a few trees lost, we are delving and hewing entire forests and their important ecosystems.

Binsey Poplars

felled 1879

My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,
xQuelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,
xAll felled, felled, are all felled;
xxOf a fresh and following folded rank
xxxxxxxxxNot spared, not one
xxxxxxxxxThat dandled a sandalled
xxxxxxShadow that swam or sank
On meadow & river & wind-wandering weed-winding bank.

xO if we but knew what we do
xxxxxWhen we delve or hew —
xxxHack and rack the growing green!
xxxxxSince country is so tender
xxxTo touch, her being só slender,
xxxThat, like this sleek and seeing ball
xxxBut a prick will make no eye at all,
xxxWhere we, even where we mean
xxxxxxxxxTo mend her we end her,
xxxxxxxWhen we hew or delve:
After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.
xTen or twelve, only ten or twelve
xxxStrokes of havoc unselve
xxxxxxxThe sweet especial scene,
xxxRural scene, a rural scene,
xxxSweet especial rural scene.

Gerard Manley Hopkins SJ (28 July 1844 – 8 June 1889) was an English poet and Jesuit priest, whose posthumous fame places him among the leading English poets. His prosody—notably his concept of sprung rhythm—established him as an innovator, as did his praise of God through vivid use of imagery and nature. Only after his death did Robert Bridges publish a few of Hopkins’s mature poems in anthologies, hoping to prepare for wider acceptance of his style. By 1930 Hopkins’s work was seen as one of the most original literary advances of his century.

Editor’s Note: When there is no evidence for hope and when all seems chaos, that is the time we must fill the darkness with song. For who knows what may happen?

Some people presume to be hopeful
when there is no evidence for hope,
to be happy when there is no cause.
Let me say now, I’m with them.

In deep darkness on a cold twig
in a dangerous world, one first
little fluff lets out a peep, a warble,
a song—and in a little while, behold:

the first glimmer comes, then a glow
filters through the misty trees,
then the bold sun rises, then
everyone starts bustling about.

And that first crazy optimist, can we
forgive her for thinking, dawn by dawn,
“Hey, I made that happen!
And oh, life is so fine.”

Kim Stafford is Emeritus Professor at Lewis and Clark College in Oregon. He writes, teaches, and travels to raise the human spirit through poetry. In 1986, he founded the Northwest Writing Institute, and he has published a dozen books of poetry and prose, including The Muses Among Us: Eloquent Listening and Other Pleasures of the Writer’s Craft and 100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do: How My Brother Disappeared. His most recent book is the poetry collection As the Sky Begins to Change (Red Hen Press, 2024). He has taught writing in dozens of schools and community centers, and in Scotland, Italy, Mexico, and Bhutan. In 2018 he was named Oregon’s 9th Poet Laureate for a two-year term.

Editor’s Note: This is one of my all-time favorite poems, so tender and wistful, so filled with “mono no aware,”  a Japanese aesthetic term meaning “the poignant awareness of impermanence.” I had the pleasure of seeing Kunitz at the Dodge Poetry Festival a couple of years before he died. I remember sitting under a small tent on the grounds of Waterloo Village in New Jersey and talking to us about the magic and power of words. He was a very thin man and at that time in his late 90s. As he talked about a favorite word that he used in his poem “End of Summer,” he fluttered his long delicate fingers in the air as if trying to enact its meaning. The word was “perturbation.” I’ve yet to use it in a poem of mine but keep it hopefully stored in my mental inventory. I took a picture of him that day, gently gesticulating, and I keep it pressed in my favorite book of his, The Wild Braid.

Touch Me 

Summer is late, my heart.
Words plucked out of the air
some forty years ago
when I was wild with love
and torn almost in two
scatter like leaves this night
of whistling wind and rain.
It is my heart that’s late,
it is my song that’s flown.
Outdoors all afternoon
under a gunmetal sky
staking my garden down,
I kneeled to the crickets trilling
underfoot as if about
to burst from their crusty shells;
and like a child again
marveled to hear so clear
and brave a music pour
from such a small machine.
What makes the engine go?
Desire, desire, desire.
The longing for the dance
stirs in the buried life.
One season only,
and it’s done.
So let the battered old willow
thrash against the windowpanes
and the house timbers creak.
Darling, do you remember
the man you married? Touch me,
remind me who I am.

Stanley Kunitz (1905-2006) was a highly acclaimed American poet who served as the U.S. Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry twice, in 1974-1976 and again in 2000-2001. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his poetry collection, Selected Poems, 1928-1958. Kunitz also served as the New York State Poet from 1987-1989 and was a dedicated educator, teaching at multiple universities. He was appointed the U.S. Poet Laureate in 2000 at the age of 95 and held numerous other prestigious positions throughout his long career. In addition to his Selected Poems, 1928-1958, other notable collections include Passing Through: The Later Poems, New and Selected, and The Collected Poems of Stanley Kunitz. He received numerous awards, including the National Medal of Arts, the Bollingen Prize, and the Robert Frost Medal. 

Editor’s Note: This is such an evocative description of the pleasures of a summer morning, its sights, sounds, and smells, described in extrasensory detail. All seems familiar and comforting, but then there is that mysterious “someone”  passing ahead of him in whose presence the poet is able to envision a possible new way of living in the world.

Summer Morning

I love to stay in bed
All morning,
Covers thrown off, naked,
Eyes closed, listening.

Outside they are opening
Their primers
In the little school
Of the corn field.

There’s a smell of damp hay,
Of horses, laziness,
Summer sky and eternal life.

I know all the dark places
Where the sun hasn’t reached yet,
Where the last cricket
Has just hushed; anthills
Where it sounds like it’s raining;
Slumbering spiders spinning wedding dresses.

I pass over the farmhouses
Where the little mouths open to suck,
Barnyards where a man, naked to the waist,
Washes his face and shoulders with a hose,
Where the dishes begin to rattle in the kitchen.

The good tree with its voice
Of a mountain stream
Knows my steps.
It, too, hushes.

I stop and listen:
Somewhere close by
A stone cracks a knuckle,
Another rolls over in its sleep.

I hear a butterfly stirring
Inside a caterpillar,
I hear the dust talking
Of last night’s storm.

Further ahead, someone
Even more silent
Passes over the grass
Without bending it.

And all of a sudden!
In the midst of that quiet,
It seems possible
To live simply on this earth.

Charles Simic, was a Serbian American poet and poetry co-editor of The Paris Review. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1990 for The World Doesn’t End and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1986 for Selected Poems, 1963–1983 and in 1987 for Unending Blues. He was appointed the fifteenth United States Poet Laureate in 2007. Simic’s first poems were published in 1959, when he was twenty-one years old. His first full-length collection, What the Grass Says (Kayak Press, 1960), was published the following year. Simic published more than sixty books in the United States and abroad, twenty titles of his own poetry among them, including The Lunatic (Ecco, 2015); New and Selected Poems: 1962–2012 (Harcourt, 2013); Master of Disguises (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010); That Little Something (Harcourt, 2008); My Noiseless Entourage (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2005); Selected Poems: 1963–2003 (Faber and Faber, 2004), for which he received the 2005 International Griffin Poetry Prize; The Voice at 3:00 AM: Selected Late and New Poems (Harcourt, 2003); Night Picnic (Harcourt, 2001); Jackstraws (Harcourt, 1999), which was named a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times; and The Book of Gods and Devils (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990). This poem is from Selected Poems 1963–1983, George Braziller, 1986.

Editor’s Note: Ahhh, the languid days of summer with its cookouts, coolers, colorful effusion of flowers, and the possibility of happiness despite our failings.

Advance Praise for the Coming Season

Clouds turn opalescent. A gate
gleams in the mist, its chipped
posts and rail ends shining.

The sky opens to sunlight,
and fathers carry laughing children
into pavilions. Coolers glow

blue and red on wooden tables.
Pork and beans wait in transparent
bowls. Margarine shines

on hot dog buns. Trees go crazy
with flowering, their loosed petals
bouncing down pathways. A boy sees

a branch like a dragon bone,
swaying, lifting. Tulips open
their soft mouths. A girl sings

to her hamster in its blue plastic cage.
It sleeps in its torn paper nest. A father
imagines voices, his parents speaking

his name. Forgiven, he thinks. His clumsy
heart, his dirty hands. A potato chip bag
lies open before him. His baby cries.

Barbara Daniels’ most recent book, Talk to the Lioness, was published by Casa de Cinco Hermanas Press. Her poetry has appeared in Main Street Rag, Free State Review, Philadelphia Stories, and many other journals. She received four fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. Her poem, “Advance Praise for the Coming Season,” appeared in the Remington Review (internet), Spring 2022. Posted here with permission of the author.

Soaking up Sun

Editor’s Note: The evocative details of Hennen’s poetry steep us in the special sights and smells of farm life, the blessings of rest, and those magical moments of silence between two people when something important is communicated.

Today there is the kind of sunshine old men love, the kind of day when my grandfather
would sit on the south side of the wooden corncrib where the sunlight warmed slowly
all through the day like a wood stove. One after another dry leaves fell. No painful
memories came. Everything was lit by a halo of light. The cornstalks glinted bright as
pieces of glass. From the fields and cottonwood grove came the damp smell of
mushrooms, of things going back to earth. I sat with my grandfather then. Sheep came
up to us as we sat there, their oily wool so warm to my fingers, like a strange and
magic snow. My grandfather whittled sweet-smelling apple sticks just to get at the
scent. His thumb had a permanent groove in it where the back of the knife blade
rested. He let me listen to the wind, the wild geese, the soft dialect of sheep, while his
own silence taught me every secret thing he knew.

Born into a big Dutch-Irish family in 1942 in Morris, Minnesota, Tom Hennen grew up on farms. After abandoning college, he married and began work as a letterpress and offset printer in 1965. In 1972 he helped found the Minnesota Writers’ Publishing House, printing work with a press stashed in his garage—work that included his first chapbook, The Heron with No Business Sense. He worked for the Department of Natural Resources Wildlife Division in the 1970s and later worked as a wildlife technician at the Sand Lake National Wildlife Refuge in South Dakota. Now retired, he lives in St. Paul near his children and grandchildren. This poem, is from Darkness Sticks to Everything: Collected and New Poems. It is reprinted with permission of Copper Canyon Press.

Spy Poetry: Work by Sally Bliumis-Dunn

Editor’s Note: When two people work intimately together over time, their work takes on the quality of a carefully choreographed dance in which both go about their tasks without seeming to take note of the other yet seem to move to the same music. This poem wonderfully captures this relationship in action. I especially love her phrase “in the quiet of the long familiar.”

Work

I could tell they were father and son,
the air between them slack, as though
they hardly noticed one another.

The father sanded the gunwales,
the boy coiled the lines.
And I admired them there, each to his task

in the quiet of the long familiar.
The sawdust coated the father’s arms
like dusk coats grass in a field.

The boy worked next on the oarlocks
polishing the brass until it gleamed
as though he could harness the sun.

Who cares what they were thinking,
lucky in their lives
that the spin of the genetic wheel

slowed twice to a stop
and landed each of them here.

Sally Bliumis-Dunn is a poet, teacher, and associate editor-at-large for Plume. She received her MFA in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College and teaches at Manhattanville College and the 92nd Street Y. Her poems have appeared in various publications, including the Paris Review, Plume, and the New York Times. She has published three collections of poetry: Talking Underwater (2007), Second Skin (2009), and Galapagos Poems (2016). “Work” appears in her most recent publication, Echolocation (2018). Posted here with permission of the author.