I Need the Long March
Donna Spruijt-Metz
When I was my grandmother's mother I knew
she would be beautiful in the time of war
so I set to knitting her

a whole skein of swans
in flawless V formation

pearl-colored
to match her skin,
steadfast guides for the long march

I sewed coins and jewelry into the hem of her dress
copal, charms, carnelian and ash
into her long sleeves

and when my fear for her life was bigger
than my love
I released her to the steppes and flew

above it all, above the war, grasslands
snowfields, past the small horses
and the gray wolves
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This poem was born in the magic of Tyree Daye’s workshop at Frost Place. One of Tyree’s prompts encouraged us to ignore all the ideas of time that we had learned—to think of our ghosts, and create any world we wanted to put them in. For reasons I will never understand except ‘magic,’ my grandmother, who had been lost to me since I was very young, came to mind.
 
Park Service and Library of Congress staff join poet laureate Ada Limón (far left) in unveiling a poem-inscribed picnic table at Cape Cod National Seashore -- image by Shawn Miller
On Ada Limón's Park Project Series

"Cape Cod National Seashore, too, is a special place for Limón. Two weeks after 9/11, she and a friend drove there from Brooklyn, where she lived at the time, for a seven-month residency at Provincetown’s Fine Arts Work Center. Each day, she took long walks through the dunes to settle her mind before writing. The experience reinforced for her 'the healing power of poetry and nature combined, and the way it can bring you back to your most rooted self,' she told the crowd in June."

via NATIONAL PARKS CONSERVATION ASSOCIATION
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Cover of Joyelle McSweeney's Death Styles
What Sparks Poetry: Joyelle McSweeney on "Death Style 2.8.21 (Mary Magdalene, Collectible Glasses)"

I wrote all the poems of Death Styles on the shockwave of catastrophic grief, trying to understand the physics of my new, confounding planet, a planet clammy with calamity, with weed beds and reed beds, NICU wards, of cause decoupled from event. I think of irreparability, a loss that runs only one way, converting my skull to a locked vault, a cave. Can you witness absence? How does the individual body, immobilized by calamity, become a place to which sound and consequence flood?”

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