In light of the Coronavirus crisis, Poetry Daily will continue the impromptu series, What Keeps Us. Until further notice, we will devote Wednesdays to posting poems to sustain and uplift through trying times. We thank you for reading and hope that you will share poems with your friends and neighbors. Please be well.
Natalia Toledo
Translated from the Zapotec and Spanish by Irma Pineda & Clare Sullivan
For my grandmother’s wheelchair,
for my friend Candida’s green mangoes.
For houses made of brick,
their damp vermillion.
For the gray slats of my cradle,
for spiny cacti
growing on the walls.
For the jicalpextles my mother
got from other people’s weddings.
For those days when the sun burnished my hair
And my smile was the blinding bright of a salt crust.
For the photographs stuck to a piece of cardboard,
their swift migration to our family altar.
For the petate and its map of urine stains,
for the twisted trees upon the rippled water.
For all that I made into a life.
I sing.
from the journal ASYMPTOTE
READ ABOUT TODAY'S POEM
Share Share
Tweet Tweet
Forward Forward
Poetry Daily logo
Poetry Daily Thanks You

Many thanks indeed to all our readers and contributors, whose passion for poetry inspires us, and to all our generous donors, without whose support we could not continue. We look forward to sharing the very best contemporary poetry with you for the rest of the year. Stay safe and stay well.
Color head shot of Kaie Kellough and an image of the cover of his book, Magnetic Equator.
Kaie Kellough Wins 2020 Griffin Poetry Prize 

"Kaie Kellough's Magnetic Equator is the Canadian winner of the 2020 Griffin Poetry Prize. The award annually gives out two $65,000 prizes—one to a book of Canadian poetry and one to an international book of poetry—making it one of the world's richest prizes of its kind."
 
via CBC
READ ALL TODAY'S HEADLINES
What Sparks Poetry:
Ana Božičević on Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market”"

"I can’t underestimate how much this kind of spelled repetition, the shifting meter and rhyme patterns following their own emotional logic and the music inside the words, influenced the way I write in English—Rossetti’s “irregular measures” that John Ruskin amusingly declared a “calamity of modern poetry.” But they also found a kindred bell in the ear as I simultaneously read the anonymous Croatian poets of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, poems of chant and repetition, epic simile and Slavic antithesis."
READ THIS WEEK'S ISSUE
You have received this email because you submitted your email address at www.poems.com. 
If you would like to unsubscribe please click here.

© 2020 Poetry Daily, Poetry Daily, MS 3E4, 4400 University Dr., Fairfax, VA 22030

Design by the Binding Agency