Until further notice Poetry Daily will devote Wednesdays to What Keeps Us, an impromptu series featuring poems that 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.
Lord, when you send the rain think about it, please, a little? Do not get carried away by the sound of falling water, the marvelous light on the falling water. I am beneath that water. It falls with great force and the light Blinds me to the light.
"The uneven rhythms of grief don’t allow you to do or to feel life as you did before. Even the writer you were before is altered. It’s unquantifiable. Losing my mother forced me into the most difficult transformation of my life. Each poem drew me further into something I didn’t want to accept, which was that my mother was dead."
Resources for Supporting and Uplifting the Black Community
Movement for Black Lives: "The Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) seeks to reach millions, mobilize hundreds of thousands, and organize tens of thousands, so that Black political power is a force able to influence national and local agendas in the direction of our shared Vision for Black Lives."
National Bail Fund Network: "The National Bail Fund Network is made up of over sixty community bail and bond funds across the country. We regularly update this listing of community bail funds that are freeing people by paying bail/bond and are also fighting to abolish the money bail system and pretrial detention." Find here a listing of pre-trial bail funds by state.
Campaign Zero: "We can live in a world where the police don't kill people by limiting police interventions, improving community interactions, and ensuring accountability."
Poetry Daily stands with the Black community. We oppose racism, oppression, and police brutality. We will continue to amplify diverse voices in the poetry world. Black Lives Matter.
"I would often dart into the library and sit sopping on that bench waiting for the rain to let up. That’s where I’d linger as my doused clothes would start to make me shiver in the aggressive air conditioning. Which is why I was literally trembling, I can remember, when I first came across Galway Kinnell’s When One Has Lived A Long Time Alone, which turned out not only to be a book, but also a poem within the book, and eleven little poems within that poem."
