Posts Tagged: other people’s poetry
Poem: Our Book of Delights by Arielle Hebert
This poem arrived in email like a gift, and I love every speck of it, the rain on the flora, that tiny bow on the end of a thin silver braid, the idea that “kindness is the only weapon worth wielding,” love on its wild zigzagging path, all of it. So I thought I’d share it.
All our windows open, steady drizzle on the kudzu’s
broad backs, birds making their music like this isn’t North
Carolina, but a tropical rainforest, and we’re somewhere
deep in the palms and vines. But it’s our own ferns and fiddleheads,
evergreens and sugar maples, trillium blooming, or on the verge,
for no one in particular, for everyone in particular, as if to say,
Go on, enjoy it. Rain, flowers, time on earth. The apple I
hand-picked at the market. Braiding my friend’s hair, silver
in my fingers, how I tie a tiny bow gently at the end
just as the sun comes out. I want to believe this is true power, that
kindness is the only weapon worth wielding, and I wield it,
land blow after blow to my enemies, without mercy.
Mercy. Bring the wine. Set the table for surprise guests.
No matter the plates don’t match and we’ve run out of chairs,
only that there is bread and laughter, enough to go around.
Parades, in spite of—Pride, in spite of—Please, someone answer all my
questions about hummingbirds and the little futures we are
reaching for, the ones rising above the horizon right before our eyes,
such intoxicating visions, our truest selves, with nothing to hide. Go on.
Trust the child standing barefoot in the rain, her face turned
up to the sky. Trust that crescendo building in your chest is your
voice, singing what you need to hear, the stone-heavy echo
welled from darkest springs. Go ahead. Open the door. No one can
explain how to love the world. It doesn’t happen all at once. But
you can start here. Tonight, with yourself. Someone near you. Let it go
zigzagging town to town. Look, there. It’s already coming back around.
Copyright © 2026 by Arielle Hebert. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on April 15, 2026, by the Academy of American Poets. https://poets.org/poem/our-book-delights
Interior: The Suburbs
A poem not by me.
There is no rest for the mind
in a small house. It moves, looking for God,
with a mysterious eye fixed on the bed,
into a cracked egg at breakfast,
looking for glory in an arm-chair,
or simply noting the facts of life
in a fly asleep on the ceiling.
The mind, sunk in quiet places,
(like old heroes) sleeps no more,
but walks abroad in a slouch hat
performing adultery at violent street corners;
then, trembling, returns,
sadly directs its mysterious eye
into a coffee-cup. There is no rest
for there are many miles to walk in the small house,
traveling past the same chairs, the same tables,
the same glassy portraits on the walls,
flowing into darkness.
There is no victory in the mind,
but desperate valor,
shattering the four walls,
disintegrating human love,
until the iron-lidded mysterious eye
(lowered carefully with the frail body
under churchyard gardens)
stares upward, luminous, inevitable,
piercing solar magnitudes
on a fine morning.
–Horace Gregory, from his first poetry collection, Chelsea Rooming House (Covici-Friede, 1930)