Gratitude: October 31, 2025

Calling Things What They Are 

I pass the feeder and yell, Grackle party! And then an hour later I yell, Mourning dove afterparty! (I call the feeder the party and the seed on the ground the afterparty.) I am getting so good at watching that I’ve even dug out the binoculars an old poet gave me back when I was young and heading to the Cape with so much future ahead of me it was like my own ocean.Tufted titmouse! I yell, and Lucas laughs and says, Thought so. But he is humoring me; he didn’t think so at all. My father does this same thing. Shouts out at the feeder announcing the party attendees. He throws out a whole peanut or two to the Stellar’s jay who visits on a low oak branch in the morning. To think there was a time I thought birds were kind of boring. Brown bird. Gray bird. Black bird. Blah blah blah bird. Then, I started to learn their names by the ocean, and the person I was dating said, That’s the problem with you, Limón, you’re all fauna and no flora. And I began to learn the names of trees. I like to call things as they are. Before, the only thing I was interested in was love, how it grips you, how it terrifies you, how it annihilates and resuscitates you. I didn’t know then that it wasn’t even love that I was interested in, but my own suffering. I thought suffering kept things interesting. How funny that I called it love and the whole time it was pain. 

Ada Limon

Gratitude: October 30, 2025

Carnivore

Multiple sclerosis is a disease in which the immune system eats away at the exterior covering of nerves.

I’m consuming myself,

  my doctor says, and I get

the urge each time I lift

  a fork. How it rattles

with anticipation as I aim to

  plunge it into the scar

tissue of my chest. No worries.

  The heart is not where

the heart should be. Neither

  am I. I’m supposed to be

upright and sturdy as a moose.

  Better yet, a gazelle. I

used to walk so gracefully,

  so elegantly in that animal

me. How my antelope

  nose soothed my buck’s

neck before he stotted away,

  stomping out my heart

like the last flame before

  silence. I’m lonely. This entire

burnt forest has forgotten

  my name. I bend to lick

the ash and remember

  nothing. Not even the twitch

of my heart once pink and

  alive as a nest of hatchlings.

He chewed it off just like

  I’m gnawing at the dead

gazelle of me. At night I detect

  thumping. Heartbeat or

hoofbeat, I can’t say. It creeps

  further away, memory of

a man who once loved me,

  hungering for the whole of me.

Oh I used to be more edible

  than this. And so mealy.

Rigoberto Gonzalez

🪷

This Isn't The Life

I ought to live. But it’s mine. I hold close this life, reach out and

grasp it as it flutters and press it close to my chest, my heart beating

alongside it, making a new rhythm. I suffer, yes. Yes, I suffer. And I still

love nothing like I love myself. My life, stained orange like the tangerines

I feed the dog. I accept this living, let a slice dissolve on my tongue,

hold both the acid and sweetness. This isn’t the life I sought out to live,

but I thank it, I’ll anoint the day in fragrance and oils, all parts of its soft

and delicate shell. I am here with you, says your life. With my woes,

with my woes, with my woes and all the other parts. If you’re reading

this, it don’t end here. If you’re reading this, it isn’t too late.

Faith Arkorful

The Uses of Sorrow

(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)

Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.

Mary Oliver

(Thankfully it doesn’t take years anymore.)

❤️

Gratitude: October 29, 2025

from Knots

R. D. Laing

1

They are playing a game. They are playing at not

playing a game. If I show them I see they are, I

shall break the rules and they will punish me.

I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game.

They are not having fun.

I can’t have fun if they don’t.

If I get them to have fun, then I can have fun with them.

Getting them to have fun, is not fun. It is hard work.

I might get fun out of finding out why they’re not

I’m not supposed to get fun out of working out why

they’re not.

But there is even some fun in pretending to them I’m not having fun finding out why they’re not.

A little girl comes along and says: let’s have fun.

But having fun is a waste of time, because it doesn’t

help to figure out why they’re not having fun.

How dare you have fun when Christ died on the Cross

for you! Was He having fun?

It is our duty to bring up our children to love,

honour and obey us.

If they don’t, they must be punished,

otherwise we would not be doing our duty.

If they grow up to love, honour and obey us

we have been blessed for bringing them up properly.

If they grow up not to love, honour and obey us

either we have brought them up properly

        or we have not:

if we have

there must be something the matter with them;

if we have not

there is something the matter with us.

❤️

Shoulders

Naomi Shihab Nye

A man crosses the street in rain,

stepping gently, looking two times north and south,

because his son is asleep on his shoulder.

No car must splash him.

No car drive too near to his shadow.

This man carries the world’s most sensitive cargo

but he’s not marked.

Nowhere does his jacket say FRAGILE,

HANDLE WITH CARE.

His ear fills up with breathing.

He hears the hum of a boy’s dream

deep inside him.

We’re not going to be able

to live in this world

if we’re not willing to do what he’s doing

with one another.

The road will only be wide.

The rain will never stop falling.

Gratitude: October 28, 2025

Diving into the Wreck

First having read the book of myths,
and loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of the knife-blade,
I put on
the body-armor of black rubber
the absurd flippers
the grave and awkward mask.
I am having to do this
not like Cousteau with his
assiduous team
aboard the sun-flooded schooner
but here alone.

There is a ladder.
The ladder is always there
hanging innocently
close to the side of the schooner.
We know what it is for,
we who have used it.
Otherwise
it is a piece of maritime floss
some sundry equipment.

I go down.
Rung after rung and still
the oxygen immerses me
the blue light
the clear atoms
of our human air.
I go down.
My flippers cripple me,
I crawl like an insect down the ladder
and there is no one
to tell me when the ocean
will begin.

First the air is blue and then
it is bluer and then green and then
black I am blacking out and yet
my mask is powerful
it pumps my blood with power
the sea is another story
the sea is not a question of power
I have to learn alone
to turn my body without force
in the deep element.

And now: it is easy to forget
what I came for
among so many who have always
lived here
swaying their crenellated fans
between the reefs
and besides
you breathe differently down here.

I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or weed

the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty
the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters.

This is the place.
And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body.
We circle silently
about the wreck
we dive into the hold.
I am she: I am he

whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes
whose breasts still bear the stress
whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies
obscurely inside barrels
half-wedged and left to rot
we are the half-destroyed instruments
that once held to a course
the water-eaten log
the fouled compass

We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.

 Adrienne Rich

Gratitude: October 27, 2025

Shipwreck

I was shipwrecked beneath a stormless sky 

in a sea shallow enough to stand up in.

— Fernando Pessoa

They’re laughable 

when we get there—

the ultimate articulations 

of despair: trapped 

in a tub filling with 

our own tears; strapped

to a breadstick mast

a mouse could chew 

down; hopping around 

the house in paper shackles

wrist and ankle. It’s

always stagey. Being

lost is just one’s fancy—

some cloth, some paste—

the essence of flimsy. 

Therefore we 

double don’t know 

why we don’t take off

the Crusoe rags, step

off the island, bow 

from the waist, accept 

your kudos.

Kay Ryan

🙏

Again a Solstice

It is not good to think
of everything as a mistake. I asked 
for bacon in my sandwich, and then 

I asked for more. Mistake.
I told you the truth about my scar: 

I did not use a knife. I lied 
about what he did to my faith 
in loneliness. Both mistakes.

That there is always a you. Mistake. 
Faith in loneliness, my mother proclaimed,

is faith in self. My instinct, a poor polaris.
Not a mistake is the blue boredom 
of a summer lake. O mud, sun, and algae!

We swim in glittering murk. 
I tread, you tread. There are children

testing the deep end, shriek and stroke, 
the lifeguard perilously close to diving. 
I tried diving once. I dove like a brick. 

It was a mistake to ask the $30 prophet
for a $20 prophecy. A mistake to believe.

I was young and broke. I swam
in a stolen reservoir then, not even a lake. 
Her prophesy: from my vagrant exertion 

I'll die at 42. Our dog totters across the lake, 
kicks the ripple. I tread, you tread.

What does it even mean to write a poem? 
It means today 
I'm correcting my mistakes.

It means I don't want to be lonely.

Jennifer Chang

🙏

Number 1 son called with good news this morning. 

Gratitude: October 26, 2025

Vandals, Early Autumn 

Who shattered my window with a stone?
I thought it was the wind, willful
after a dry season, or heaven
making a terse remark, but aiming
my flashlight I watched
the last boy’s crimson back
struggle over the fence
and a tiger’s fierce face sewn
on his denim jacket as a namesake.
How his few years have plundered
the heartwood of reason—why should I
relinquish this house, this poetry
I shaped and reshaped with love
to the wont of stray bamboo?
No use calling the sheriff nor
waking a friend. The angst is mine, mine.
I slouch, I sigh, my eyes
too bleary now to see
early autumn’s dragonflies
skim over the filthy tarn
and into the water oat,
cut water oat.

Marilyn Chin

.

ADVICE

Be the stealth      between stones

       The abracadabra        amongst        clones
 

Be the fighting fish with a fancy tail

       The wizard who        deifies        gnomes
 

No worry        be happy        missiles flying 

       While innocents        are dying
 

You’re pretty nimble        for your age

      One day a wombat        next day        a sage
 

On the way to feeding a despot

       You summoned        your rage
 

Most virtuous mother        don’t be fooled

       They will bomb our shelter        scorch our earth
 

Unwind        regroup        turn swine        into pearl

       Be the change        you wanna see        in the girl

Marilyn Chin

.

That Part in the Music 

Once loyal to a cruel master,

the dog moves like a man who

not so long ago weighed a lot less

and is still figuring the difference,

what if anything to make of it.

It doesn’t matter, whatever

tenderness she’s known since;

the dog, I mean. They’re called

hesitation wounds, the marks

left where the hand, having meant 

to do harm, started to, then 

reconsidered. As if a hand

could reconsider. The dog 

wants to trust, you can see it 

in her eyes, like that part in the music 

where it still sounds like snow 

used to. There were orchards, still;

meadows. She’ll never be free.

Carl Phillips

.