by James Crews
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Joy is the happiness that doesn’t depend on what happens.
Brother David Steindl-Rast
Only the creative mind can make use of hope. Only a creative people can wield it.
Jericho Brown
Contents
Acknowledgments
Foreword, Ross Gay
The Necessity of Joy, James Crews
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, Hope
Ted Kooser, Dandelion
Barbara Crooker, Promise
Amanda Gorman, At the Age of 18—Ode to Girls of Color
Dorianne Laux, In Any Event
Laura Grace Weldon, Astral Chorus
Garret Keizer, My Daughter’s Singing
David Romtvedt, Surprise Breakfast
Ron Wallace, The Facts of Life
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, Fifteen Years Later, I See How It Went
Kathryn Hunt, The Newborns
Christen Pagett, Shells
Laure-Anne Bosselaar, Bus Stop
January Gill O’Neil, Hoodie
Terri Kirby Erickson, Angel
Todd Davis, Thankful for Now
Reflective Pause: The Joy of Presence
Barbara Crooker, Autism Poem: The Grid
Diana Whitney, Kindergarten Studies the Human Heart
Gail Newman, Valentine’s Day
Abigail Carroll, In Gratitude
Michelle Wiegers, Held Open
David Graham, Listening for Your Name
Heather Swan, Another Day Filled with Sleeves of Light,
Annie Lighthart, A Cure Against Poisonous Thought
Mary McCue, Forgiveness
Heather Lanier, Two Weeks After a Silent Retreat
Reflective Pause: The Kingdom at Hand
Jane Hirshfield, Today, When I Could Do Nothing
Laura Ann Reed, Red Thyme
Laura Foley, The Once Invisible Garden
James Crews, Down to Earth
Freya Manfred, Old Friends
Brad Peacock, Let It Rain
Molly Fisk, Against Panic
Naomi Shihab Nye, Over the Weather
Paula Gordon Lepp, Notions
Ellen Bass, Any Common Desolation
Reflective Pause: Returning to the World
Mark Nepo, Language, Prayer, and Grace
Jane Hirshfield, The Fish
Patricia Fargnoli, Reincarnate
Linda Hogan, Innocence
Farnaz Fatemi, Everything Is Made of Labor
Susan Kelly-DeWitt, Apple Blossoms
Nancy Miller Gomez, Growing Apples
Danusha Laméris, Aspen
Margaret Hasse, With Trees
Kim Stafford, Shelter in Place
Heather Newman, Missing Key
Michael Kiesow Moore, Climbing the Golden Mountain
Laura Foley, To See It
Jacqueline Jules, Unclouded Vision
Danusha Laméris, Improvement
Reflective Pause: Grateful for Small Victories
Jack Ridl, After Spending the Morning Baking Bread
Wally Swist, Radiance
Kristen Case, Morning
Ross Gay, Wedding Poem
Jehanne Dubrow, Pledge
Angela Narciso Torres, Amores Perros
Noah Davis, Mending
Penny Harter, In the Dark
Nathan Spoon, A Candle in the Night
Francine Marie Tolf, Praise of Darkness
Judith Chalmer, An Essay on Age
Ted Kooser, Easter Morning
Andrea Potos, The Cardinal Reminds Me
Marjorie Saiser, When Life Seems a To-Do List
Lahab Assef Al-Jundi, Moon
Crystal S. Gibbins, Because the Night You Asked
Rob Hunter, September Swim
Joyce Sutphen, What to Do
William Stafford, Any Morning
Reflective Pause: Pieces of Heaven
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, How It Might Continue
Li-Young Lee, From Blossoms
Jessica Gigot, Motherhood
Sarah Freligh, Wondrous
Cathryn Essinger, Summer Apples
Lynne Knight, Third Year of My Mother’s Dementia
Heather Swan, Rabbit
Dale Biron, Laughter
January Gill O’Neil, In the Company of Women
Alice Wolf Gilborn, Leaning to the Light
Andrea Potos, I Watched an Angel in the Emergency Room
Alberto Ríos, When Giving Is All We Have
Albert Garcia, Offering
Alison Luterman, Too Many to Count
Marjorie Saiser, If I Carry My Father
George Bilgere, Weather
Sally Bliumis-Dunn, Work
Reflective Pause: The Joy of Making
Danusha Laméris, Goldfinches
Connie Wanek, The Lesser Goldfinch
Tony Hoagland, The Word
Barbara Crooker, Tomorrow
Cynthia White, Quail Hollow
Laura Grace Weldon, Compost Happens
Joan Mazza, Part of the Landscape
Andrea Potos, Essential Gratitude
Reflective Pause: The Gratitude List
Laura Foley, Gratitude List
Katherine Williams, The Dog Body of My Soul
Katie Rubinstein, Scratch, Sniff
Mary Elder Jacobsen, Summer Cottage
Jane Kenyon, Coming Home at Twilight in Late Summer
Grace Bauer, Perceptive Prayer
Patricia Fontaine, Sap Icicles
Lucille Clifton, the lesson of the falling leaves
Ted Kooser, A Dervish of Leaves
James Crews, Winter Morning
Tracy K. Smith, The Good Life
Marjorie Saiser, Thanksgiving for Two
Reflective Pause: The Feast of Each Moment
Jeffrey Harrison, Nest
Ellen Bass, Getting into Bed on a December Night
Lisa Coffman, Everybody Made Soups
James Crews, Darkest Before Dawn
Brad Peacock, Rosary
Julie Murphy, To Ask
Tess Taylor, There Doesn’t
Need to Be a Poem
Amy Dryansky, Wingspan
Joy Harjo, Eagle Poem
Terri Kirby Erickson, What Matters
Mark Nepo, In Love with the World
Reading Group Questions and Topics for Discussion
Poet Biographies
Credits
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Acknowledgments
Deep gratitude to the many people who helped to make this book a reality: the team at Storey Publishing, for agreeing to take a chance on a book of poetry, especially Deborah Balmuth, Liz Bevilacqua, Alee Moncy, Jennifer Travis, and Melinda Slaving, as well as Lauren Moseley at Algonquin Books for publicity support; Katie Rubinstein for making the connection and her beautiful work; everyone at A Network for Grateful Living, especially Kristi Nelson and Saoirse McClory, for their support of poetry; Brother David Steindl-Rast for his teachings on gratefulness, which we need now more than ever; Ted Kooser, for his enduring friendship, inspiration, and example of kindness; the late, great David Clewell, whose exuberant spirit not only made me fall in love with poetry, but also led me to future mentors Ron Wallace and Jesse Lee Kercheval; all of the poets included here for their generosity in sharing their work; Ross Gay for writing a foreword that is both a blessing and a poem in and of itself; Naomi Shihab Nye, Maria Popova, and Elizabeth Berg for their support of writing that makes us all feel more human; Garland Richmond, Diana Whitney, Heather Newman, Heather Swan, and Michelle Wiegers for essential support; my students at SUNY-Albany and Eastern Oregon University for giving me hope and serving as first readers; my husband, Brad Peacock, and our Crews and Peacock families, for reminding me every day why I’m so grateful to be alive.
Foreword
I have been spending a lot of time lately thinking about witness, about how witness itself is a kind of poetics, or poesis, which means making. By which I mean I have been wondering about how we make the world in our witnessing of it. Or maybe I have come to understand, to believe, how we witness makes our world. This is why attending to what we love, what we are astonished by, what flummoxes us with beauty, is such crucial work. Such rigorous work. Likewise, studying how we care, and are cared for, how we tend and are tended to, how we give and are given, is such necessary work. It makes the world. Witnessing how we are loved and how we love makes the world. Witness and study, I should say. Witness as study, I think I mean.
Truth is, we are mostly too acquainted with the opposite, with the wreckage. It commands our attention, and for good reason. We have to survive it. But even if we need to understand the wreckage to survive it, it needn’t be the primary object of our study. The survival need be. The reaching and the holding need be. The here, have this need be. The come in, you can stay here need be. The let’s share it all need be. The love need be. The care need be. That which we are made by, held by, need be. Who’s taken us in need be. Who’s saved the seed need be. Who’s planted the milkweed need be. Who’s saved the water need be. Who’s saved the forest need be. The forest need be. The water. The breathable air. That which witnessed us forth need be. How we have been loved need be. How we are loved need be.
How we need need be, too. Our radiant need. Our luminous and mycelial need. Our need immense and immeasurable. Our need absolute need be. And that study, that practice, that witness, is called gratitude. Our gratitude need be.
This is what I want to study. This is with whom.
Ross Gay
The Necessity of Joy
One day a few weeks ago, I woke up in a terrible mood. I’ve always been a morning person, relishing those early hours when the world is still asleep, before emails, texts, and the rest of my distractions take over. I love the ritual of making pour-over coffee for my husband and myself, inhaling the fragrant steam that curls up from the grounds as I pour on the boiling water. Yet this day, I couldn’t shake my annoyance as I smashed a pat of cold, hard butter onto my toast, tearing a hole in the bread. I shook my head and scowled, then looked over at my husband who smiled. “What?” I said. He just stared deeply into my eyes and asked, “Are you happy to be alive today?” I glared at him at first, but I also let his question stop my mind. And in that gap, a rush of gratitude swept in. Yes, I was happy to be alive, happy to be standing in the kitchen next to the man I love, about to begin another day together. Happy to have coffee, food, and a warm place to live. Happy even to feel that dark mood swirling through me because it was also evidence of my aliveness.
Are you happy to be alive? The poems gathered in this book each ask, in their own ways, that same question, which has more relevance now than ever. As Brother David Steindl-Rast, the founder of A Network for Grateful Living, has famously pointed out: “In daily life, we must see that it is not happiness that makes us grateful. It is gratefulness that makes us happy.” Paying attention to our lives is the first step toward gratitude and hope, and the poems in How to Love the World model for us the kind of mindfulness that is the gateway to a fuller, more sustainable happiness that can be called joy. Whether blessing a lawn full of common dandelions, or reminding us, as Tony Hoagland does, to “sit out in the sun and listen,” these poets know that hope, no matter how slight it might seem, is as pressing a human need right now as food, water, shelter, or rest. We may survive without it, but we cannot thrive.
During these uncertain and trying times, we tell ourselves that joy is an indulgence we can no longer afford. And we’ve become all too familiar with the despair filling the airwaves and crowding our social media feeds, leading to what psychologists now call empathy or compassion fatigue, whereby we grow numb and disconnected from the suffering of others. We want to stay informed about what’s going on in the world, yet we also know that absorbing so much negativity leaves us drained and hopeless. We know it’s robbing us of the ability to be present to our own experience and grateful for something as simple as the moon, which is here, as Lahab Assef Al-Jundi points out, “to illuminate our illusion” of separateness from one another.
For many years, reading and writing poetry has been my personal source of delight, an antidote to the depression that can spring up out of nowhere. I now carve out what I call “soul time” for myself each day, making space for silence and reflection, even if it is just five or ten minutes, even if I have to wake up a little earlier to do it. The time I take to pause and read a favorite poem from a book, or jot down some small kindness from the day before, can utterly transform my mindset for the rest of the day. I invite you to use each poem in How to Love the World in a similar way, to make reading (and writing, if you wish) part of your own daily gratitude practice. Throughout the collection, I’ve also included reflective pauses, with specific suggestions for writing practices based upon the poems. When you encounter one of these, you may simply read that poem and reflection, then move on. Or you might keep a notebook nearby and stop to write, letting the guiding questions lead you more deeply into your own encounters with gratitude, hope, and joy. I encourage you to use any of these poems that spark something as jumping-off points for a journal entry, story, or poem of your own.
I trust in the necessity and pleasure of all kinds of creativity—from cooking a meal to fixing a car to sketching in the margins of a grocery list—but poetry is an art form especially suited to our challenging times. It helps us dive beneath the surface of our lives, and enter a place of wider, wilder, more universal knowing. And because poetry is made of the everyday material of language, we each have access to its ability to hold truths that normal conversation simply can’t contain. When you find a poem that speaks to exactly what you’ve felt but had no way to name, a light bulb flashes in some hidden part of the self that you might have forgotten was there. I’ll never forget the first time I read Ellen Bass’s poem, “Any Common Desolation,” and rushed to share it with my friends and family. “You may have to break your heart,” Bass writes, suggesting that we might need to be more open and vulnerable to the world than we feel we can stand at time
s, but then she reminds us, “it isn’t nothing to know even one moment alive.” We need poems like the ones gathered here to ground us in our lives, to find in each new moment what Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer describes as, “the chance for joy, whole orchards of amazement.”
James Crews, July 2020
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
Hope
Hope has holes
in its pockets.
It leaves little
crumb trails
so that we,
when anxious,
can follow it.
Hope’s secret:
it doesn’t know
the destination—
it knows only
that all roads
begin with one
foot in front
of the other.
Ted Kooser
Dandelion
The first of a year’s abundance of dandelions
is this single kernel of bright yellow
dropped on our path by the sun, sensing
that we might need some marker to help us
find our way through life, to find a path
over the snow-flattened grass that was
blade by blade unbending into green,
on a morning early in April, this happening
just at the moment I thought we were lost
and I’d stopped to look around, hoping
to see something I recognized. And there
it was, a commonplace dandelion, right
at my feet, the first to bloom, especially
yellow, as if pleased to have been the one,
chosen from all the others, to show us the way.
Barbara Crooker
Promise
This day is an open road
stretching out before you.
Roll down the windows.
Step into your life, as if it were a fast car.
Even in industrial parks,
trees are covered with white blossoms,
festive as brides, and the air is soft
as a well-washed shirt on your arms.
The grass has turned implausibly green.
Tomorrow, the world will begin again,
another fresh start. The blue sky stretches,
