Quote for the Day: October 30th, 2021

*Tuck Everlasting (40th Anniversary Edition)* by Natalie Babbitt and Gregory Maguire (Foreword)

Don’t be afraid of death; be afraid of an unlived life. You don’t have to live forever, you just have to live.
Natalie Babbitt, Tuck Everlasting

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Poem for the Day: October 29th, 2021

when we empower ourselves, we inspire others to empower 
themselves. step up & lead the way for others to follow in your 
footsteps. encourage them to do better than you were able to, 
because hope can never be lost as long as the future rests in 
the hands of our sisters & siblings. 

—be the light.

Today’s poem is from shine your icy crown by amanda lovelace. She is the author of several bestselling poetry collections, among them the titles in the “women are some kind of magic” series, the “you are your own fairy tale” trilogy, and the “things that h(a)unt” duology. shine your icy crown was published in January 2021 by Andrews McMeel Publishing and is available to purchase wherever books are sold.

Quote for the Day: October 29th, 2021

Inner peace begins the moment you choose not to allow another person or event to control your emotions.
Pema Chödrön

Poem for the Day: October 28th, 2021

Appalachian Cityscape by J. David

sidewalks here brag windchimes and landmines
               we sent to someone else’s children
sometime halfway between home & working to death
               & the news never showed us any casualties
                              without white faces

our hearts couldn’t make less
               of a difference—
kept coming up zeroes on the scale
               when nobody bought into the system
stacked atop a thousand years of bread while the crows
laughed from behind their picket lines & an apocalypse hit—

left us so far backward our sins fell out
                                                            & we were nothing to god

someday the freight-train grows up & everybody cheers
for breakfast like they’re finally getting fed a hung jury
                              or a vomit stain on a factory-stack
                              we were supposed to clean
               as if it wasn’t already too late
to save our planet from ourselves

city lights come out dancing
                              when calamity turns up
at the family party & we knew then
we’d written enough
persona poems for other people’s grief
to place the blame on someone else
for all the murders

god-machine said none of us
were allowed to hear prayer any longer
                                                            & the saddest part is
we got caught with our hands red in a forest of sunflowers

                                             considering the circumstances
               skyscrapers look too much like dead bodies
to be comfortable with stepping out the front door

heroin built a church on our street
& everyone showed up to mass
wearing shirts that said
               keep out the liquor stores

just goes to show—being liberal never saved anybody
                                                            when the factories left

                              we stuck our heads in closets
                                                            after we mailed our principles
               to four years from now & the government
called it a write-off when they taxed the poor
out of town but we knew better
than to ask poor folks to beat us kind

               the whole block lit up like a bug-jar in june
               stapled to the back of a climate crisis
when the kids came home drunk again

               better late than dead

               better dead than prison

everyone’s uncle got parole & we came home
               when we heard our mothers calling
to say the hospital burned
                              a hole in the budget

spent our twenties buying flowers
                              for graveyards

spent our twenties in closets
               retrieving our heads
               & nobody clapped
when the war ended

you must have heard by now—
god came knocking
               & nobody answered the door

© 2021 J. David. Today’s poem was taken from Harvard Review Online, which is published by Houghton Library at Harvard University under the auspices of the college’s President and Fellows. J. David (they/them) is the chief poetry critic for the Cleveland Review of Books as well as the editor-in-chief of Flypaper. Their work has also appeared or is forthcoming in Salt Hill, The Colorado Review, Redivider, and Passages North, among other presses and publications.

Quote for the Day: October 28th, 2021

*The Fellowship of the Ring (The Lord of the Rings, #1)* by J.R.R. Tolkien

I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.
“So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring (The Lord of the Rings, #1)

Poem for the Day: October 27th, 2021

*How to Not Be Afraid of Everything* by Jane Wong (Alice James Books, 2021)

Tenants by Jane Wong

Above: my neighbor's feet, fussing from room to room,
velvet hooves tendering my head. Was the fruitcake
curdling? Would the mail make it there on time? (it must
make it there on time)? Below: I try to light
the stove. Little clicks of the tongue, heat and water, my altar.
Underground: my grandfather breathes through a silk jacket,
a dandelion mane resting between his lips. Here: every living
thing is an altar. Sweet worms kiss his knuckles to sleep,
loose doorknobs I open: story after story. My family:
a spiral staircase, a fish spine picked clean, the snail's
miasmic song. 1982: sun gasping through splintering snow,
a lemon slice folded in my mother's cup, a generous
bulb, a lighthouse across oceans she can not see. 1985: we slept in
a split-level attic, squirrels running across
the beams. 1964: my grandfather offers my mother one egg.
Her brother looks on, fists full of ash. 1967: to make
the body dance with sticks and stones to break alone. Within:
prison, rose finch feathers float through bars, what he can not
talk about. My grandfather sings to me in a ladybug-speckled coffin,
the color of good teeth. Above: my grandmother keeps
heaps upon heaps of oil containers, poured and repurposed
in hunched Fanta plastic. This living can be so quiet sometimes,
you can hear the lights humming. Moss slinks into my walls
and is painted over, white to mint. I touch
the wall, these porous lives, this dense understory. Today: I cut
a telescope in two to see everything inside, out:
new.

© 2021 Jane Wong. “Tenants” is taken from Wong’s collection How to Not Be Afraid of Everything, which was published by Alice James Books in October 2021 and is now available to purchase wherever books are sold. Her first collection, Overpour, was published by Action Books in 2016. In addition to being a recipient of a Pushcart Prize, Wong has been awarded numerous fellowships and residencies. She is currently an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Western Washington University. You can find out more about Wong and her work on her website.

Quote for the Day: October 27th, 2021

We only have what we give.
Isabel Allende

Poem for the Day: October 26th, 2021

Trees by Joyce Kilmer

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in Summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.

Today’s poem first appeared in the August 1913 issue of Poetry. It was later collected in Kilmer’s 1914 collection entitled Trees and Other Poems, which is available to purchase wherever books are sold. A free public domain version of the text can be accessed and disseminated without limitations at Project Gutenberg.

Quote for the Day: October 26th, 2021

Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Isn’t fall the best? Multicolored leaves falling from the trees. The smell of change in the air. The intentional slowing-down of time. And pumpkin spice everything, of course. Since today’s quote is from The Great Gatsby, I thought I’d share my favorite edition of that particular book, which you can purchase here.

Poem for the Day: October 25th, 2021

As Kingfishers Catch Fire by Gerard Manley Hopkins

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame; 
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells 
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's 
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name; 
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same: 
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells; 
Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells, 
Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came. 

I say móre: the just man justices; 
Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces; 
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is — 
Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places, 
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his 
To the Father through the features of men's faces.

Today’s poem was taken from Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poems and Prose, which was published by Penguin Classics in 1985 and is available to purchase wherever books are sold.