Poem-A-Day April 3: more or less mad for similar reasons

Hello Friends,

Yesterday’s poem-a-day discussed early warnings in the context of 2026. But we also find early warnings from the poets who came before us, as in this piece by Muriel Rukeyser, in which she grapples with exactly how poets (and others) can pass these warnings forward. For context, Rukeyser lived from 1913 to 1980, and this particular poem was published in Rukeyser’s 1968 collection The Speed of Darkness. When Rukeyser repeats the line “I lived in the first century of these wars,” I believe she does so in part to emphasize that first implies another century to come.

Thank you again for celebrating poetry month with me.

— Ællen

Poem (I lived in the first century of world wars)

I lived in the first century of world wars.
Most mornings I would be more or less insane,
The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,
The news would pour out of various devices
Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen.
I would call my friends on other devices;
They would be more or less mad for similar reasons.
Slowly I would get to pen and paper,
Make my poems for others unseen and unborn.
In the day I would be reminded of those men and women,
Brave, setting up signals across vast distances,
Considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.
As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened,
We would try to imagine them, try to find each other,
To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile
Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other,
Ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means
To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves,
To let go the means, to wake.

I lived in the first century of these wars.

■

Poem-A-Day April 2: Early Warnings

Hello Friends,

Today’s very recent poem by Charles Rafferty appeared in the Winter 2026 issue of The Southern Review and was shared by my favorite poetry source on Instagram, @poetryisnotaluxury.

Thank you again for celebrating poetry month with me.

— Ællen



The Problem with Early Warnings

People don’t like to leave a party
unless the house is actually
on fire. Even then, if the flames
are far enough away
to be pretty, they’ll finish
their drink, take one more pass
at the hors d’oeuvres.
How things happen has always been
unclear. Hurricanes begin
in a place where no one lives.
Agents of the government start
to wear masks. Fascism is
a word my neighbors won’t use
yet. They are following
the law, they say, and the sirens
are coming for someone else.

■

Poem-A-Day April 1: Happy National Poetry Month 2026!

Hello Friends,

Happy National Poetry Month 2026! In celebration, I will be sending you one poem per day just for the month of April: 30 days, 30 poems, 30 poets.

My wish for you this month is that taking a moment to read a poem each day may provide a break in your racing thoughts — as the movement of the light and clouds does in today’s poem, written by Danusha Laméris, from her first poetry collection The Moons of August:



Thinking

Don’t you wish they would stop,
all the thoughts swirling around in your head,
bees in a hive, dancers tapping their way across the stage.
I should rake the leaves in the carport, buy Christmas lights.
Was there really life on Mars? What will I cook for dinner?
I walk up the driveway, put out the garbage bins.
I should stop using plastic bags, visit my friend
whose husband just left her for the Swedish nanny.
I wish I hadn’t said Patrick’s painting looked, “ominous.”
Maybe that’s why he hasn’t called.
Does the car need oil, again? There’s a hole in the ozone
the size of Texas and everything seems to be speeding up.
Come, let’s stand by the window and look out
at the light on the field. Let’s watch how
the clouds cover the sun and almost nothing
stirs in the grass.

■

When Laméris writes, “Come, let’s stand by the window and look out,” I sometimes imagine the window in this poem looks out at another poem — maybe “The Meadow” by Marie Howe or “Pleasure” by Rick Barot. Perhaps one day soon a poem or a line becomes your next thought between “Was there really life on Mars?” and “What will I cook for dinner?”

For those of you new to this poem-a-day list: No prior poetry experience is required! I try my best not to send you some obtuse obscure long ode that’s impossible to understand. My selections do 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 (and my favorite part of the library to wander around picking random books off the shelves).

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 (which is celebrating its 30th year this year!).

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 30: All the words that I gather

Where My Books Go

All the words that I gather,
     And all the words that I write,
Must spread out their wings untiring,
     And never rest in their flight,
Till they come where your sad, sad heart is,
     And sing to you in the night,
Beyond where the waters are moving,
     Storm-darkened or starry bright.

■
Hello Friends,

With those words penned by W.B. Yeats in 1892, we’ve come to the end of the last poem of this National Poetry Month celebration: 30 days, 30 poems, 30 poets. We’ve covered poems from the 1700s, 1800s, 1900s, and 2000s — including every decade from the 1970s through the 2020s. We’ve read lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer poets, Black poets, Native American poets, Asian American poets, Arab American poets, Latina poets, white poets, mixed race poets, and more. We’ve read couplets, tercets, quatrains, cinquains, a ghazal, a haiku, a sonnet, a triple sonnet, and a found poem. Not bad for 30 days!

I hope one or two poems stuck with each of you. Thank you so much again for celebrating poetry month with me. I hope you’ll “meet me in 811” again next April.

— Ællen

Poem-A-Day April 29: fully formed

What I Didn’t Know Before

was how horses simply give birth to other
horses. Not a baby by any means, not
a creature of liminal spaces, but already
a four-legged beast hellbent on walking,
scrambling after the mother. A horse gives way
to another horse and then suddenly there are
two horses, just like that. That’s how I loved you.
You, off the long train from Red Bank carrying
a coffee as big as your arm, a bag with two
computers swinging in it unwieldily at your
side. I remember we broke into laughter
when we saw each other. What was between
us wasn’t a fragile thing to be coddled, cooed
over. It came out fully formed, ready to run.

■
Hello Friends,

Today’s sonnet by the most recent Poet Laureate of the United States Ada Limón can be found in her 2018 collection The Carrying. If you enjoyed today’s poem, Limón was also featured for several previous poem-a-days, which you can peruse on the blog counterpart to this poem-a-day email list, meetmein811.org.

Thank you for celebrating poetry month with me!

— Ællen

Poem-A-Day April 28: Mother Talks Back to the Monster

Mother Talks Back to the Monster

Tonight, I dressed my son in astronaut pajamas,
kissed his forehead and tucked him in.
I turned on his night-light and looked for you
in the closet and under the bed. I told him
you were nowhere to be found, but I could smell
your breath, your musty fur. I remember
all your tricks: the jagged shadows on the wall,
click of your claws, the hand that hovered
just above my ankles if I left them exposed.
Since I became a parent I see danger everywhere—
unleashed dogs, sudden fevers, cereal
two days out of date. And even worse
than feeling so much fear is keeping it inside,
trying not to let my love become so tangled
with anxiety my son thinks they’re the same.
When he says he’s seen your tail or heard
your heavy step, I insist that you aren’t real.
Soon he’ll feel too old to tell me his bad dreams.
If you get lonely after he’s asleep, you can
always come downstairs. I’ll be sitting
at the kitchen table with the dishes
I should wash, crumbs I should wipe up.
We can drink hot tea and talk about
the future, how hard it is to be outgrown.

■
Hello Friends,

Have you ever felt like a monster? What emotions do you entangle with love or anxiety? Who do you invite to talk at the kitchen table after bedtime? Today’s poem by Carrie Shipers first appeared in the North American Review (Vol. 300, no. 4, 2015). It can also be found in the anthology Healing the Divide: Poems of Kindness & Connection (2019) edited by James Crews.

Thank you for celebrating poetry month with me!

— Ællen

Poem-A-Day April 27: a group of ladybugs

on loveliness

i read somewhere

that a group of ladybugs is called

     a loveliness. and i wonder

what the person who gave them

that name (surely someone of at least

     measurable humanity) knew,

or thought they did, about what love

—what kind, specifically—so embeds

     itself in a thing that the thing,

subsequently, becomes an embodiment

of that love: the way river breaks into current;

the way trees make forest, simply

     by standing closer to each other

than to anything else…

     …by which I mean: i need you

to tell me which of my black spots

     you find loveliest. which interruption

of my red feels most human

to the forest of your fingers; the current

     you river into touch

along my breaking skin.

■
Today’s poem by Southern Black ecopoet Ariana Benson appeared in the Kenyon Review (Summer 2024). Read more about ecopoetry here.

Poem-A-Day April 26: you create me

Hello Friends,
Today is International Lesbian Visibility Day, so we’re reading a poem by Black feminist, lesbian, poet, mother, warrior Audre Lorde in which she emphasizes the “creation” in “recreation.” This poem first appeared in Lorde’s 1978 collection The Black Unicorn.
Enjoy.
— Ællen

Recreation

Coming together
it is easier to work
after our bodies
meet
paper and pen
neither care nor profit
whether we write or not
but as your body moves
under my hands
charged and waiting
we cut the leash
you create me against your thighs
hilly with images
moving through our word countries
my body
writes into your flesh
the poem
you make of me.

Touching you I catch midnight
as moon fires set in my throat
I love you flesh into blossom
I made you
and take you made
into me.

■

Poem-A-Day April 25: Miss you. Would like to take a walk with you.

Miss you. Would like to take a walk with you.

Do not care if you just arrive in your skeleton.
Would love to take a walk with you. Miss you.
Would love to make you shrimp saganaki.
Like you used to make me when you were alive.
Love to feed you. Sit over steaming
bowls of pilaf. Little roasted tomatoes
covered in pepper and nutmeg. Miss you.
Would love to walk to the post office with you.
Bring the ghost dog. We’ll walk past the waterfall
and you can tell me about the after.
Wish you. Wish you would come back for a while.
Don’t even need to bring your skin sack. I’ll know
you. I know you will know me even though I’m
bigger now. Grayer. I’ll show you my garden.
I’d like to hop in the leaf pile you raked but if you
want to jump in? I’ll rake it for you. Miss you
standing looking out at the river with your rake
in your hand. Miss you in your puffy blue jacket.
They’re hip now. I can bring you a new one
if you’ll only come by. Know I told you
it was okay to go. Know I told you
it was okay to leave me. Why’d you believe me?
You always believed me. Wish you would
come back so we could talk about truth.
Miss you. Wish you would walk through my
door. Stare out from the mirror. Come through
the pipes.

■
Hello Friends,

Gabrielle Calvocoressi is one of my favorite poetry professors (from my Stanford days) and one of my favorite poets. In an October 2021 interview about their “Miss you” series of poems, Calvocoressi shares, “When I was younger, when my mom took her life, I didn’t sleep for like four months, because I was so scared her ghost would come. As I’ve gotten older, and particularly I live in an old house now, and the idea of ghosts coming and kind of like, you know, good and generative haunting, is something that really matters to me, and that COVID has in so many ways opened a kind of gate, where it’s just like, oh gosh, there’s just so many, there are so many losses that I wish I could just bring something back.”

If you enjoyed today’s poem, you might also enjoy another of Calvocoressi’s poems featured for Poem-A-Day April 27, 2018 (“The Sun Got All Over Everything”).

Thank you for celebrating poetry month with me.

— Ællen

Poem-A-Day April 24: When I hear the word miracle I want to throw up

This Too Shall Pass

was no consolation to the woman
whose husband was strung out on opiods.

Gone to a better place: useless and suspect intel
for the couple at their daughter’s funeral

though there are better places to be
than a freezing church in February, standing

before a casket with a princess motif.
Some moments can’t be eased

and it’s no good offering clichés like stale
meat to a tiger with a taste for human suffering.

When I hear the word miracle I want to throw up
on a platter of deviled eggs. Everything happens

for a reason: more good tidings someone will try
to trepan your skull to insert. When fire

inhales your house, you don’t care what the haiku says
about seeing the rising moon. You want

an avalanche to bury you. You want to lie down
under a slab of snow, dumb as a jarred

sideshow embryo. What a circus.
The tents dismantled, the train moving on,

always moving, starting slow and gaining speed,
taking you where you never wanted to go.

■
Hello Friends,

Sometimes the title of a poem acts as the first line, as in today’s selection by poet Kim Addonizio, originally published as part of the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day on March 12, 2024. There is a reference in this poem to a famous haiku by Mizuta Masahide, which you can read here.

Kim Addonizio was also previously featured for Poem-A-Day April 25, 2024 (“To the Woman Crying Uncontrollably in the Next Stall”).

Thank you for celebrating poetry month with me!

— Ællen