the country (billy collins)
i grew up with this poem. i heard it for the first time curled up in the back seat of my parents’ car on a roadtrip and it stuck with me. i think it might have been the first poem i ever loved. the personification, the grandeur of the mundane scene, the humor, and the indifference to rhyming.
wild geese (mary oliver)
add a tally to the ’left sobbing’ board. the sound of geese now always brings to mind this poem for me and my day is always better for it. i perceive the imagery is so intense, rapid, and surrounding - it reminds me of the feeling of standing on a dock as a kid by the ocean and watching the clouds move /so/ fast over my head. it isn’t just the perceived speed, for me, it is the visceralness of it all. it isn’t close and intense and intimately visceral like many poems i cherish - instead it’s the rawness of the wide world - it’s the feeling of being awash in a profoundly uncaring but painfully beautiful world; there is so much room and so little time to love yourself.
prayer for transformation (kalonymus b. kalonymus ben meir)
this poem about the anguish of not identifying with the gender assigned to you, written in 1322 by a rabbi, always brings me to tears. it is a complete thing; i don’t have more to say about it. read it.