tgifreytag

Poem-A-Day April 23: Love after Love

Love after Love

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

■

Hello Friends,

When was the last time you sat down and feasted on your life? Today’s poem by Saint Lucian poet Derek Walcott (1930 – 2017) appears in his 1976 collection Sea Grapes. Among his many honors, in 1992 Walcott was the first Caribbean writer to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Thank you for celebrating poetry month with me.

— Ællen

Poem-A-Day April 22: the bumblebees are making a comeback

Hello Friends,

It’s Earth Day, so we’re reading “I Don’t Know What Will Kill Us First: The Race War or What We’ve Done to the Earth” by Fatimah Asghar, which was first published as a Poem-a-Day on poets.org in 2019. You may notice echoes from the previous two days’ poems, “This Spring” by James A. Pearson and “Memory Poem” by Marlanda Dekine.

Thank you again for celebrating poetry month with me.

— Ællen

I Don’t Know What Will Kill Us First: The Race War or What We’ve Done to the Earth

so I count my hopes: the bumblebees
are making a comeback, one snug tight
in a purple flower I passed to get to you;

your favorite color is purple but Prince’s
was orange & we both find this hard to believe;
today the park is green, we take grass for granted

the leaves chuckle around us; behind
your head a butterfly rests on a tree; it’s been
there our whole conversation; by my old apartment

was a butterfly sanctuary where I would read
& two little girls would sit next to me; you caught
a butterfly once but didn’t know what to feed it

so you trapped it in a jar & gave it to a girl
you liked. I asked if it died. you say you like
to think it lived a long life. yes, it lived a long life.

■

Poem-A-Day April 21: This Spring

Hello Friends,

Yesterday’s poem was about a human saving animals. Today’s poem is about animals, and nature more broadly, saving us. You may also notice a similarity to the first poem we read this month, “Thinking” by Danusha Laméris, which also expresses a sense that “everything seems to be speeding up” and turns to nature to slow down.

“This Spring” appears in poet James A. Pearson‘s 2024 collection The Wilderness That Bears Your Name.

Enjoy,
Ællen

This Spring

How can I love this spring
when it’s pulling me
through my life faster
than any time before it?
When five separate dooms
are promised this decade
and here I am, just trying
to watch a bumblebee cling
to its first purple flower.
I cannot save this world.
But look how it’s trying,
once again, to save me.

■

Poem-A-Day April 20: for snails and slugs

Hello Friends,
When I was young, I made up a superhero who rescued all the snails and slugs from the roads when it rained — so today’s poem by Marlanda Dekine holds a special place in my heart. “Memory Poem” was first published as a Poem-a-Day on poets.org in 2026.
Enjoy,
Ællen

Memory Poem

I am a child
of wonder again and
rain tells me to watch
for snails and slugs.

I gather dirt, sand, and sticks
for the terrarium
where I make a safe home
away from footsteps, fast cars, and ditch water.

I don’t want them to die
so I make them
a space for living.

I ask my ma to buy lettuce
because in the book I got from the library
I learned they will eat lettuce.

I am
greedy to learn
what keeps everything alive.

Their spiral shapes leave shiny trails behind.
I imagine I am a snail leaving
magic everywhere I go.

■

Poem-A-Day April 19: Tender

Hello Friends,

Today’s poem by California poet Sophie Klahr first appeared in the The Threepenny Review (Fall 2022). I love that this poem starts off being about a bear, and ends up also being about what it means to write a sonnet — giving us the feeling the poet herself might’ve only discovered what this poem was about part-way through writing it.

Thank you again for celebrating poetry month with me.

— Ællen

Tender

I spent late morning weeping with the news:
a black bear with burnt paws is euthanized
along the latest wildfire’s newest edge.
It was crawling on its forearms, seeking
a place to rest. I Google more; reports
leak out: the bear had bedded down behind
a house, below a pine, to lick its paws.
In hours before its end, officials named
it Tenderfoot, though some reports report
just Tender. Later, I will teach a class
where we’ll discuss the length of lines in poems.
I’ll say a sonnet is a little song
to hold a thing that otherwise cannot
be held: a lonely thing; a death; a bear.

■

Poem-A-Day April 18: Late Bird

Late Bird

Count me among the noon risers who stumble,
dazed and bad-haired, from the nest midday,
pecking the crazed dirt for half-torn moth,
pear’s white core, severed worm. I’ve never
been one to trill at chink of dawn, to hop,
skip, chirrup before full sun. I’m better
at picking over crumbs, stitching a quilt
from what’s left, remaindered, given up
for gone. Better at betting the careless
will miss the best. Count me among
the nightbirds who sip starlight, a guitar’s
fading strains. Find me where moondust
swirls in streetlamp glow and stray dogs sleep.
What clings to the bone is most sweet.

■

Hello Friends,

Today’s sonnet by Angela Narciso Torres was first featured as a Poem-a-Day on poets.org in 2026.

Angela Narciso Torres writes about this celebration of those who are not early birds: “Inspired by an inversion of Shakespeare’s line from Sonnet 73: ‘Bare ruin’d choirs, where sweet the late birds sang,’ this sonnet is an argument for being the late bird who lives on what’s been left behind. I’ve always been fascinated by old things: books and artifacts from another age, anything analog, vintage, or antique—not just for the stories they hold but also for what new lives might be in them. The poem asks, can beauty and meaning be found in what’s been overlooked, abandoned, or discarded? Perhaps this is why we make poems.”

— Ællen

Poem-A-Day April 17: A to Z

Bird

After I fumble another conversation about love, I think,
Bird wouldn’t have hesitated for a moment, played
coy as if everyone didn’t already know what #33 would do,
daggers for eyes, soft hands ready to guide that orange ball
exactly where he said he would. I’ve taken shots before,
fear be damned, and missed more than I made,
gone up and down the court enough to know
halftime won’t fix everything.
I’m bruised, my knee barks, my shot is shit, and I
just need the bank to be open for once, for the glass to
kiss the ball back, softly. I’m always writing to you
like a last-ditch prayer, a heave from halfcourt
moving like a meteor, like I could turn this white page of
nothing into a night sky, these words constellations,
old messages that would say in a hundred different
shapes that I love you. All I ever wanted was Bird’s game,
quietly telling opponents the spot on the floor where he would
rise, after a screen and two dribbles, in the corner like a yellow
sun and let the ball fly. I’m always writing to you
to remind myself that all love poems are about the future.
Under the bright lights of this metaphor, I’m digging deep, not
vanishing when it matters most, to find the heart to take a shot
when the clock winds down to nothing. The X-Man,
Xavier McDaniel, laughs when he tells of how Bird took his heart once.
You already know you have mine when the clock says
zero my no-look mouth, my honey crossover, my silky net.

■

Hello Friends,

Did you notice that the first letter of each line in today’s poem by Tomás Q. Morín spells the alphabet — from the first line starting with A to the last line starting with Z? This is one of my favorite ancient poetic forms, called an abecedarian or abecedarius.

Morín writes about this poem, “Hall of Famer Larry Joe Bird of the Boston Celtics was my favorite basketball player when I was a kid, partly because we both hailed from small, rural towns, and because he played with so much passion and joy. Stories of his confidence are legendary, especially how he told opponents what he planned to do and then did it. An abecedarian also announces to a reader its formal intentions. In keeping with the ancient function of the form, my poem is a hymn, a praise song for love and basketball and our beautiful human hearts that dare.”

If you’re interested, you can read other abecedarians I’ve featured over the years on the blog version of this poem-a-day list, meetmein811.org.

Thank you for celebrating poetry month with me.

— Ællen

Poem-A-Day April 16: trying to hear the birdsong through the auto-tune

The World Is Too Much With Us

—after William Wordsworth

The world is too much with us. Late and soon
it’s morning, phone in hand, and a screen on my wrist powers
on to report the no rest I had. News, a tragedy—so easily ours—
already breaking as I crack my eggs. Rage and prayers, rage and prayers, a boon
for the tycoon’s fear-campaign, clicks for the zillionaire buying up the moon.
Ad, ad, an AI figment, someone squawking, someone hawking—hours
consumed, of this only life, and who is left in the garden, who is tending the flowers?
I am trying to hear the birdsong through the auto-tune
of all this ubiquitous engineered crooning, but a podcast informs me silence will be
extinct by the weekend, gone like thought and the good kind of alone. Peace is outworn;
it’s chaos that feeds the algorithm, no likes for the actual, the tangible. No lea
without a billboard promising Hell as if it isn’t here. But don’t be forlorn,
I’m sold—the world is yours! (after this ad) unending and enhanced on a screen. Don’t mind the sea
at the door. Time for a selfie, suggests my phone. A filter. I can add (for free!) horns.

■

Hello Friends,

Today’s poem, “The World Is Too Much With Us” by Leila Chatti, was first featured as a Poem-a-Day on poets.org in 2026. “The World Is Too Much With Us” is also the title of a famous sonnet by William Wordsworth (1770 – 1850), which you can read here.

Chatti explains how she based her poem on Wordsworth both in content and form: “I wrote this poem after reading William Wordsworth’s because it would not leave my mind. How are we grappling with the same problems, two hundred years later? There’s so much disconnect in our world, so much wrong being done, and for terrible reasons. As Wordsworth writes in his original, ‘We have given our hearts away.’ I wanted to write an echo of sorts, a response to his poem for our current time, so I used his first line and all of the same end words, in their original order.”

I hope you’re enjoying poetry month! Thank you for celebrating poetry with me.

— Ællen

Poem-A-Day April 15: The Power of Traffic

The Power of Traffic

If you want to live in the city,
you have to understand the beauty of heavy traffic.
You have to love the thunketa thunketa of trucks at 4 a.m.
bringing meat and flowers into the markets and stores.

You have to witness the cement mixer
at the intersection of Willoughby and Grant
locked in a confrontation with the garbage truck,

neither guy willing to back down, both of them together
making one compound of a man
who keeps telling himself to shut up.

If you want to live in the city,
you have to see the feeder roads and interstates
from high above, at night, rhinestoned and seething,
spread out like the arms of an enormous squid

or like an alien intelligence, gathering facts,
or like the branching nervous system of a dinosaur,
all tangled up like a mixed metaphor.

You have to understand that traffic has taken the place in our lives
of the wind and the moon;
you have to hear the hum of the parkway as surf,
and the honking of horns in the morning
as a great migration of geese.

You have to lie in your bed at night with the window open
and listen to the music of the traffic;
the lonely howl of the ambulance siren
rushing toward the worst day in somebody’s life,

and then for a moment the silence that follows
like the blank space hung between one heartbeat and the next,
as the cables swing gently in the wind,
and the light changes from green to red to green.

■

Hello,

Today’s poem for all my city-dwelling friends appears in Turn Up the Ocean (2022) by Tony Hoagland.

As a reminder, and for those who may have joined the list later in the month, I am celebrating National Poetry Month by sending you one poem a day just for the month of April: 30 days, 30 poems, 30 poets. My selections skew heavily, but not exclusively, to American poets writing in English — hence the name “Meet Me in 811,” the Dewey Decimal Code for American Poetry (my favorite part of the library to wander around).

This poem-a-day series is strictly for personal use only; in almost all cases, I do not have poets’ nor poetry publishers’ permission to reproduce their work. For a more official poem-a-day email list, please visit the Academy of American Poets (poets.org), the creators and sponsors of National Poetry Month.

I do my best to preserve each poem’s format; however, please note that email clients tend to have minds of their own and may force a word onto the next line if a line is too long for your screen size.

Thank you for celebrating poetry month with me!

— Ællen

Poem-A-Day April 14: I know who I am

Hello Friends,

I can only aspire to the belief in self that the speaker expresses in today’s poem by Mahogany L. Browne. Browne is the inaugural poet-in-residence at Lincoln Center, and her books include Black Girl Magic, Woke: A Young Poet’s Call to Justice, Woke Baby, Vinyl Moon, and Chlorine Sky.

Enjoy,
Ællen

Country of Water

I know who I am because I believe it

The breath in my chest
Insistent in its choice

The skin that I’m in
The bones and blood and veins
It carries like a promise

     Have you witnessed the ocean

Moving with so much gust and life
Have you witnessed the river
Still waters bubbling the rebirth of school

     Have you witnessed your body

Its own country of water
Moving against the tide of a world
So heartbreaking     it’s forgotten its own voice

Be still friend
Be still
Be kind to yourself in the gift of stillness

I know who I am because I believe it
I know
I know
Who I
Who I
Believe
Believe
Believe
In three’s we will come
A drip of water moving against a boulder
Water slow and steady can turn rock
Into a pebble
Like anxiety
Like self-doubt
Smaller
Smaller
Until gone
Let your love for yourself be the water
Be the rise
Be the mist
Let you be

I know who I am because I believe it
I believe I am my mother’s daughter
I believe I am my grandmother’s prayers
I believe I am my great-grandmother’s backbone revealed

I am I am because I believe so
I am because a woman believed in me
What a continent I became
What a country of water I be
I flow and fluid and rise and ebb and I believe in me

     I am not wrong
I am wronged

In this skin I’ve reclaimed
From this trap of this country’s tourniquet
Only to find the sweet solace is a river bed
Its mud beckons me closer to its silt
Small fish and forgotten glass unearth themselves
Like baby teeth
Only one can cut into flesh purposely
Only one does not know what it is capable of

I believe in the air as much as I believe in the fire
I believe in the fire as much as the water consumes
I believe in a higher source
Energetic and wise
I believe in my ability to thrive

This body
     This body is a good thing

Turning two miles walked over a bridge into a family’s meal
Creating poems that become cashier’s checks
Dentist bills and rent
I’ve three holes in my teeth
And a nation that pretends I didn’t almost die for it to survive

I am I am still here still here
I am still here and like the ocean, full of salt and shells
Full of ship remnants and noble ones
I bleed and the sand grieves
I be because someone survived for me to be here
Today

Breathing this almost air
Marching for cleaner belongings
My front seat beneath the deadening stars
Is still a seat
Is still a ground
Is still a home that I can pronounce my given name
To write amongst the forgotten names
The taken and the ignored
But today

     There are no tombstones

Today
There is no true death

Only life
Only life
Only a song of the living
Maybe even a belief system
With water as its minister

     I am water

I dive into my own currents
I dress my dreams in the satin breath
Of my ancestors

I know
I know
I know who I am
I know who I am because I believe it

■