30 Great Poems for April, Day 30: “After Apple-Picking” by Robert Frost

This one’s in the public domain, so I’ll put it right here.


After Apple-Picking
by Robert Frost

My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.
I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight
I got from looking through a pane of glass
I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough
And held against the world of hoary grass.
It melted, and I let it fall and break.
But I was well
Upon my way to sleep before it fell,
And I could tell
What form my dreaming was about to take.
Magnified apples appear and disappear,
Stem end and blossom end,
And every fleck of russet showing clear.
My instep arch not only keeps the ache,
It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.
I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.
And I keep hearing from the cellar bin
The rumbling sound
Of load on load of apples coming in.
For I have had too much
Of apple-picking: I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.
There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.
For all
That struck the earth,
No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,
Went surely to the cider-apple heap
As of no worth.
One can see what will trouble
This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.
Were he not gone,
The woodchuck could say whether it’s like his
Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,
Or just some human sleep.



When pondering what to post today, the last day of April and therefore the last post in this series of Great Poems for April—no pressure!—I realized a strange thing. Even though I’d been concentrating on going through my own trove of favorite poems through the month, I hadn’t really thought about which one poem is my very favorite. You know, that one that accompanies you through life, whose lines remain with you like bits of a song that you find yourself humming while doing dishes or driving to work. As soon as I thought that, I immediately knew which one was my favorite: “After Apple-Picking.”

What I love most about this poem is its unusual rhyme scheme. This being Frost, of course there’s a pattern. But it’s so erratic, so—dare I say—rebellious that I wonder if Frost was thinking, screw the establishment; I’m gonna go all Picasso on the old end rhyme. And he was a master of the old end rhyme. And yet he was young when he wrote this. And probably somebody out there knows what that was all about, but I’m kind of glad I don’t know, in the same way I’m glad I don’t know for sure what the different kinds of sleep are that he talks about. Or whether this is about the fruit of the tree of knowledge and the banishment from Eden. Or about the burdens of fame (that’s my go-to—“I am overtired / Of the great harvest I myself desired”—but again, he was young, so I’m not so sure). And if you want to see what other people think about all those things, spend an amusing hour or so surfing the internet, looking at the different theories. Those people are all so sure they know what this poem means.

What I do know about this poem is that it’s beautiful. Phrases of this poem are, I think, among the best in American poetry (“ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,” “load on load of apples coming in,” and that low-geared, four-word musical breakdown of a line, “As of no worth”). I love the way he changes up the rhythm and sentence length, and of course those erratic line lengths that sneak the rhymes in there among all the truncation where you can barely hear it. The phrasing is so memorable that I literally can’t pick up a stepladder without whispering “My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree / Toward heaven still,” or cut open an apple without thinking “Stem end and blossom end.” And this line—“Essence of winter sleep is on the night, / The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.” I can go back and read that for a lifetime and never get tired of it.

Every year that I reread this poem, it means something different to me; I find some small part I hadn’t thought much about before. (Right now it’s the "pane of glass / I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough”—can’t you see it? Don’t you sometimes go a whole day, unable to rub that strangeness from your sight?) Loving a good poem is like a friendship. You go through time together, and even though you never know everything about that poem, you keep discovering things that it didn’t tell you before. And your relationship with it changes too. If it’s really a great poem, the poem weathers the changes. And so do you.



Readers, it’s been great fun this month to write about these 30 poems I love. Thank you for all the likes and comments on social media; I hope you’ve had as good a time as I have.

30 Great Poems for April, Day 29: “Poem Written in the Sixth Month of My Wife’s Illness” by Ellen Bass

Read “Poem Written in the Sixth Month of My Wife’s Illness” in the literary journal Rattle here.

This poem, to me, feels like a master class in how to write moving moments. How to stay with each moment just long enough to sink it into the reader’s skin, not unlike that indelible image that has stuck in my mind ever since I first read this poem in 2016: “setting the straps in the grooves on her shoulders, / reins for the journey.” And then the image of the “crumpled bills, steeped in the smells / of the lives who’d handled them.” And then the smells themselves, this egalitarian sense that everyone goes into a liquor store at some point in their lives, just as everyone at some time or another will sit in a diner, and everyone grieves, and everyone dies.

Ellen Bass has a way of telling stories, of adding just the right detail to let you in on a bit of backstory without overburdening the poem with it. For instance, look at the line about the father in the hospital: “this time / they didn’t know if he’d pull through.” This time—so this has been a long process. They didn’t know—implying an impersonal system of doctors, and also the maddening uncertainty of medicine. So much information packed into a simple phrase. And then of course the image at the end, this waitress who seems to understand, if only that this other working woman needs some time to herself.

In this poem, there are four women—the mother, the waitress, the speaker, and her wife, who is only mentioned in the title. And with that title, again, Bass is building you a window onto the larger story that you can look through briefly; there is an ill wife in this story, and a worried speaker, and an echo back to the father in the hospital, and to the diner and crying over the cup of coffee. Such deft connections, so carefully built, between these scenes that aren’t exactly parallel, but that deeply speak to each other across time.









[All through April, I’m featuring a favorite poem every day, along with a link where you can read it. Some are classics, some are newer, but each one is the kind of poem that I read, love, and immediately want to tell all my friends about. What better to time to share them than National Poetry Month?]

30 Great Poems for April, Day 28: “A Blessing” by James Wright

Read “A Blessing” on the Academy of American Poets site here.

People, I warned you about the horses.

Sometimes you need pure happiness. And, you know, that’s rare in poetry. At least, in good poetry. It’s hard to say, Okay, I’m going to lift you up and keep you there in ecstasy, and then deliver on it. Really. Freakin’. Hard. If I knew how to do that, I’d write a happy poem every day.

I first encountered this poem, as I think a lot of people did, in high school in the 1970s. And what a great way to introduce a small-town kid to poetry. I knew these Indian ponies; I had seen that ripple and felt that “long ear / That is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist.” I didn’t realize it at the time (or perhaps the teacher, probably Mr. Flynn, explained this and I promptly forgot), but the sounds all through this poem are doing quiet work, lulling you into peace. All the “s” sounds, all the trochees—the two-syllable words with a stress on the first—darken, kindness, welcome, nuzzled. And the triplets, again with first syllables stressed—happiness, loneliness, slenderer, delicate. All such graceful words, strung together like a narcotic necklace. And good lord, he gets away with “happiness” and “loneliness” in the same damned poem! Nobody does that!

And I know it may be just because I learned this poem as a teenager, so I’ve had it in my head for 40-ish years, but there it is, right in the front of my mind, whenever I pass a horse pasture, which is pretty much every day here in southern Oregon. “They love each other. / There is no loneliness like theirs.”

And then of course the last three lines. Does anyone who reads those lines when young ever forget them?








[All through April, I’m featuring a favorite poem every day, along with a link where you can read it. Some are classics, some are newer, but each one is the kind of poem that I read, love, and immediately want to tell all my friends about. What better to time to share them than National Poetry Month?]

30 Great Poems for April, Day 27: “Fences” by Austin Smith

Read “Fences” on Poetry Daily here.

Just look at these muscular words: scolded, driven, lean, forced, march, swallow, taut. Austin Smith packs all of these into this very lean poem. All through it, there’s a sense of almost futile work, hard labor under brutal circumstances, and then these acceptances of what’s given but not wanted, things that actually harm over time: swallowing the wire, taking it in, bit by bit. By the end of this poem, you know it’s about a kind of living, not about fences at all.

Sometimes I love poems because they’re not at all like something I’d write. Others, like this one, I love because they’re poems I wish I’d written. This spare, and yet this expansive. And he piles on the sentence fragments, which makes each short line cut to the chase even faster. Startling, insidious, this poem drives its message into you gradually, the way barbed wire violates a tree.

Down at the bottom of the Poetry Daily page is an intriguing description of Smith’s book Flyover Country, from which this poem comes. Looks like great reading.









[All through April, I’m featuring a favorite poem every day, along with a link where you can read it. Some are classics, some are newer, but each one is the kind of poem that I read, love, and immediately want to tell all my friends about. What better to time to share them than National Poetry Month?]

30 Great Poems for April, Day 26: “On the Death of Friends in Childhood” by Donald Justice

Read “On the Death of Friends in Childhood” on the Poetry Foundation site here.

I developed a crush on Donald Justice in my 30s, when I had stopped writing. I hadn’t really stopped writing on purpose; I just hadn’t yet realized that having my work rejected so much in my 20s had taken its toll, and I had gradually quit the whole business, unbeknownst even to myself, just to avoid the pain of sending my work out. Instead, during that decade I immersed myself in reading poetry*—which, in retrospect, was a really good thing. One poet I read a lot back then was Donald Justice.

OK, let’s just look at one thing about this poem: It’s short. Really short. And really good. Every time I read this poem (and I do often, because how can you not? “... joining hands / In games whose very names we have forgotten...”), it reminds me that it is possible to just ring that bell even with a very short poem. Every year, I participate in a couple of month-long writing marathons, and I have to read this poem periodically to remind myself that I don’t have to write a whole page to get a good poem. And of course that’s just so much whistling in the dark, because writing short is easy—but writing short and good is one of the hardest things to do with poetry. Ask any haiku expert about that.

I lost only one friend in childhood, a kid in my class in 5th grade who had an asthma attack while playing little league baseball. And yes, there’s no other way for me to picture Ross; it’s strange to think that he’ll never be old in anyone’s mind, that he’ll always be 10 years old, a little on the short side and black-haired. Justice has that exactly right.









* One great advantage I had during that non-writing decade was a musician boyfriend who played regular gigs at a Borders bookstore, where he got paid in store credit. So we’d drive up to San Rafael, he’d play a jazz set or two, and then we’d go shopping for CDs (him) and poetry books (me). His generosity stocked my poetry bookshelves. Thank you, Ernie.








[All through April, I’m featuring a favorite poem every day, along with a link where you can read it. Some are classics, some are newer, but each one is the kind of poem that I read, love, and immediately want to tell all my friends about. What better to time to share them than National Poetry Month?]

30 Great Poems for April, Day 25: “Artifact” by Claudia Emerson

Read “Artifact” on the Poetry Foundation site here.

Claudia Emerson may be my favorite modern poet, and this poem is a prime example of why. The form is a sonnet, of course, but it’s a soft one; at times the lines rhyme exactly, while others almost don’t at all. The meter, similarly, is sometimes iambic, but mostly there are rolls and lilts that bend the rhythm into more of a meander than a march.

And then of course there’s the story, the outline of which you get in the first line and half. But with each graceful detail, Emerson layers the paint until the fuller picture comes into view, covered at last by that quilt at the end—which turns out to be much more than just a quilt. But in this house, everything that belonged to the former wife is more than what it appears. I love the way this poem imbues objects with spirit just because of what the speaker knows of their past, and because of her place in their world. This poem is from Emerson’s book Late Wife, which won the Putlizer Prize in 2006.

Emerson’s poems always had a weightiness, a gravity that seemed wise beyond her years, or really, anyone’s years. And since her death in 2014 at the too-young age of 57 (I say that completely without irony because I’m 57 now), her poems, to me, have taken on a different kind of prescience. Many of them have always choked me up, but they seem all the more brilliant, all the more hard-won now.












[All through April, I’m featuring a favorite poem every day, along with a link where you can read it. Some are classics, some are newer, but each one is the kind of poem that I read, love, and immediately want to tell all my friends about. What better to time to share them than National Poetry Month?]

30 Great Poems for April, Day 24: “Gloves” by José Angel Araguz

Read “Gloves” on Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry series here.

I first encountered José Angel Araguz and his work at a writers’ conference where he presented a fascinating workshop on erasure poetry. José was soft-spoken, down to earth, direct, and funny; he’s taught for the past few years at Linfield College in Oregon, and I can only imagine how many students think of him as their favorite professor. That was the first time I’d seen an instructor incorporate Instagram poets into a conference workshop, and it was enlightening; I have to admit that most of my opinions about Instagram poetry came from crotchety comments from older writers, whose experience with it pretty much began and ended with Rupi Kaur.

José’s poem “Gloves” isn’t an erasure poem, but like an erasure poem, it’s pared down to only what it wants to impart, small packets of information that leave the rest for the reader to fill in. It starts like a fable or myth, a made-up story, which gives it a childlike feel, almost a nursery rhyme with its short length and short lines. But this no nursery rhyme; we quickly learn there’s a father, and a prison, and these mythical gloves that become symbols of what’s missing in these two lives—letters, conversations, comminication, the father seeing the son grow up. And then those last two stanzas—again, could they be any more distilled?—where we see the father’s hand in the child’s glove, which still bears the imprint of the child, just a trace. What an amazing image.

José’s recent book Until We Are Level Again was a finalist for this year’s Oregon Book Award for Poetry. Recently he announced that he’s moving to Boston to teach at Suffolk University—where, I’m sure, a whole new crop of students will call him their favorite professor. Lucky them.










[All through April, I’m featuring a favorite poem every day, along with a link where you can read it. Some are classics, some are newer, but each one is the kind of poem that I read, love, and immediately want to tell all my friends about. What better to time to share them than National Poetry Month?]

30 Great Poems for April, Day 23: “There Are Birds Here” by Jamaal May

Read “There Are Birds Here” on the Poetry Foundation site here.

A couple of years ago, I was in a workshop group that had a great holiday tradition: For our December meeting, rather than workshop each other’s poems as usual, we each brought a stack of poems by other people that we’d read during the past year, poems that had made a great impression on us*. One of the poems I brought was this one by Jamaal May.

Reading it out loud to that roomful of people, I realized that one of the great strengths of this poem is that each line ends at a spot where you’d pause or
take a breath. This poem talks, like the poet is sitting next to you in a café and relating this story. And the way he tells it, it’s one remembered assertion after another, just as you’d say it to someone: “No, / I don’t mean the bread is torn like cotton, / I said confetti, and no / not like the confetti / a tank can make of a building.”

Every time I read this poem, I think about how many conversations we have like this on a national scale, in our jobs, and in our personal lives. How many white people are going around saying they know how things are and how to fix them, when they don’t know the reality at all? And how often are misinformed people trying, and succeeding, to control the narrative when they don’t know what they’re talking about? Whitesplaining (as in this poem), mansplaining, a whole lot of other splaining. When really, what they should be internalizing is “Shut up and let someone else do the talking while you listen.” This poem says that, beautifully. What a gift.

[All through April, I’m featuring a favorite poem every day, along with a link where you can read it. Some are classics, some are newer, but each one is the kind of poem that I read, love, and immediately want to tell all my friends about. What better to time to share them than National Poetry Month?]

* I think every workshop group should do this**. And honestly, I get tired of workshopping, and sometimes I’d rather be in a poetry group that did only this, this celebration of other poets and other poems. What a great way to be introduced to poets you may not have read before.

** I also think all workshop groups should serve wine. None of mine ever do. Maybe that’s why I’m tired of workshopping.

30 Great Poems for April, Day 22: “Thanksgiving” by Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Read “Thanksgiving” in the online journal Literary Hub here.

This is a recent poem; it came out this past November in Literary Hub, and it became yet another Aimee Nezhukumatathil poem that I love. I especially like the feel of an incantation or chant early on, a bit like a prayer with all the “blessed”s. All those details, with perhaps my favorite being one of the most intimate: “I’ve committed the soap / and clean blade of his neck to memory”—the very kind of detail you remember about someone who catches your interest. And there’s a feeling of laughter, loud talk, even of awkwardness in this circle of friends or acquaintances (we’re never really told which). And the whole poem has the feeling of a chance encounter; I mean, don’t you read this poem and think that love can happen, even at a dinner party you maybe didn’t want to go to? There’s a feeling that life opens out this way, unexpectedly.

But my favorite thing about the poem is how unresolved it is at the end, how it stops in mid-story, which we realize is the most important moment, the true revelation. The man just “grew quiet. Concerned.” And then we know why, and we also know that the speaker probably didn’t know at the time why he grew quiet. But she knows now, and she lets us know; we’re in on the beautiful secret. But he doesn’t take action; there’s no fight; we don’t see them leaving the party and exchanging phone numbers on the driveway. The rest, as they say, is history. “Married” is all we know or need to know.

All the details here are just right: the holiday, food, decor, the newness of these people, the intimations of the future. The tightly focused lens of memory and what it remembers and what it leaves out. This poem is probably too new to be in a book yet, but I’ll be buying that book when it comes out.






[All through April, I’m featuring a favorite poem every day, along with a link where you can read it. Some are classics, some are newer, but each one is the kind of poem that I read, love, and immediately want to tell all my friends about. What better to time to share them than National Poetry Month?]

30 Great Poems for April, Day 21: “A Brief History of Mine” by Nancy Carol Moody

Read “A Brief History of Mine” in Cider Press Review here.

Nancy Carol Moody is an Oregon poet whose work often leaps between everyday language and surreal imagery, and this poem is a prime example. The first three lines are firmly rooted in the real world, but by the time we get to that fourth line—“a 70-mile-per-hour egg, and I am its yolk,” we feel this truck is no longer on the road we thought it was on. Or perhaps we ourselves are veering out of the truck.

And then the startling images of the “spinning tires carving ruts in my hair” and “skin peeling back” signal that the driver/speaker is fusing with the truck; now we have to wonder where the metaphor begins and ends. Suddenly there’s a sense of hallucinogenic expansion, a sharing of space and spirit. And then another image, this one a fascinating declaration: “I was the tire jack wrapped in cloth...” More fusing, more lines of identity crossing.

Eventually truck and everything in it are the speaker, hurtling through the night, and the night itself has also become something else. And by the end, Moody has even tossed in a word I could have sworn was made up (transpicuous: transparent; easily understood, lucid)—but, like the rest of the poem, it only seems unreal, walking a line between what we expect to see and what we don’t. Packed with Moody’s signature mix of playfulness and acerbic wit, this poem makes me want to take a whole workshop on “Self-portrait as a ______________.”









[All through April, I'm featuring a favorite poem every day, along with a link where you can read it. Some are classics, some are newer, but each one is the kind of poem that I read, love, and immediately want to tell all my friends about. What better to time to share them than National Poetry Month?]

30 Great Poems for April, Day 20: “Emergency Haying” by Hayden Carruth

Read “Emergency Haying” on the Poetry Foundation site here.

This is one of my all-time favorite poems, easily in the top 10. Maybe the top 5. I go back and read this several times a year, and it hooks me in every time. Every stanza, every line, is doing something fascinating.

I’m noticing a theme emerging in this monthlong gathering of favorite poems: I love poems about work*. I love poems written by people who have actually done the work. And I love the honesty of this poem, the acknowledgment that this speaker doesn’t do this work for a living—he’s just helping a neighbor—which makes the images of the physical hardship especially vivid; my hands actually sting when I read this poem.

The religious images, honestly, go right by me. And I know, that’s sad; they’re probably the heart of this poem, so who knows what I’m missing. But let’s just say the Bible is my worst category on Jeopardy!, along with British monarchs and Roman numerals. So I have to set aside the Jesus imagery for someone to explain who is more schooled in it. I’m all about the work itself, and the slightly hallucinatory exhaustion afterward, because I’ve done that, I remember that; I worked so hard (ranch hand, long ago) and got so dirty that the bathwater hurt at the end of the day and literally ran like mud down the drain.

And then Carruth takes us back into the history of field work, of forced labor and slavery, and his images are still raw and immediate—everything that happens to those hands! And by the end, there’s his defiance, a sort of punch-drunk triumph, a strength (even momentary) in being the person who does the work, one of those who actually did the haying and the lifting, the digging and the building. There’s a little discomfort here—he’s already admitted he’s a “desk-servant, word-worker”—but any poet who can help out for a day of haying and go home and write a poem like this is also doing great work.










* Recently I was talking with the poet Tim Applegate, who has written a lot about work that he used to do, which was wood refinishing for hotels and cruise ships—a fascinating topic that you should ask him about if you ever meet him. (See his book Blueprints here.) I mentioned that I rarely see books entirely devoted to the poetry of work, and he said (rightly so) that most “work” poems are about manual labor. We talked about how tactile and kinetic physical work is as opposed to, say, desk work. So I get extra excited about poems that are about the kind of work I do these days, which basically amounts to sitting in a chair and making little clicky-click noises on a keyboard all day (which weirds me out sometimes). Memorably, Stephanie Lenox, whose work is always witty and unexpected, won the 2015 Colorado Prize for Poetry for her book about office work, The Business.









[All through April, I’m featuring a favorite poem every day, along with a link where you can read it. Some are classics, some are newer, but each one is the kind of poem that I read, love, and immediately want to tell all my friends about. What better to time to share them than National Poetry Month?]

30 Great Poems for April, Day 19: “Mermaids” by Angela Howe Decker

Read “Mermaids” on Sundress Publications’ online poetry series, The Wardrobe, here.

Disclaimer: Angela Decker and I have known each other a really long time*. Her work has an inherent goodness about it, even if the subject matter is dark or angry; her empathy for her fellow humans is always in there. In this poem, she tells the tale of a woman working a very odd job, but one that sparked Angela’s imagination and does the same for the reader.

This poem keeps up a juggling act of tones. It’s laugh-out-loud funny (“like she was a cousin or something”), but also melancholy and—yes, this is in there too—a little ridiculous, a hint of standing back and whispering to the reader, “Can you belive this?” It’s never disrespectful, but it’s always rooted in the real world, so we trust this narrator. Angela’s writing is like that; she will entertain you, but she’ll also tell you the truth. She will give you the goods.

Buy Angela’s chapbook Splendid Catastrophe here.

* When I decided to do this poem-a-day feature, I knew I wanted to include some poets I know personally. But as I started to think about whom to feature, it became like the story my parents used to tell of planning their wedding—“If we invited these people, we had to invite these other people. And if we invited person A, person B would be mad to be left out.” (They couldn't figure it out and ended up eloping.) This thing with friends' poems became a similar diplomatic tangle, the kind we run into a lot in the poetry world. Whom to invite to do a reading? Whom to solicit work from for the journal? Who gets to be in this workshop group? I don’t have an answer to all that, but it occasionally snags our vitally important network of friends and tears at it a little. I’ve been that person with their nose out of joint because I didn’t get picked. I’ve also been the one doing the picking that somebody got angry with. My mantra about all this is an annoyingly simple one that works most of the time: “Let it go. Keep writing.”

[All through April, I’m featuring a favorite poem every day, along with a link where you can read it. Some are classics, some are newer, but each one is the kind of poem that I read, love, and immediately want to tell all my friends about. What better to time to share them than National Poetry Month?]

30 Great Poems for April, Day 18: “Invoking the Muse in Cell Block B” by Nancy Miller Gomez

Read “Invoking the Muse in Cell Block B” in the literary journal Rattle here.

This poem is from Nancy Miller Gomez’s chapbook Punishment, which won the Rattle chapbook prize* last year and details her life teaching writing workshops in prisons. When I got the chapbook in the mail, I had some trepidation, expecting it to be relentlessly grim. But while the book is powerful (as this poem is) all the way through, Gomez has such a deft touch that she can show you facets of the experience you never expected to see—images like the “Doppler shift of footsteps / as guards come and go, their shapeless voices rising / and falling in the halls.” Or that “greenish paint slopped onto cinderblock / so thick it looks like molded cheese.” Sights, sounds, smells—she really puts you in these places, distracted by the details as if you’re sitting there with her. And the people she’s teaching are, well…people. Flawed, vulnerable, sometimes funny. Not monolithic, which, I think, is one of the points she subtly makes.

I particularly like the way she doesn’t try to end the story in this poem; she’s doesn’t look for closure when describing the men in her workshop and the painful circumstances that brought them here: “Each scar provides its own dark facts. / What if the thesis is a bottle smashed / on a body? What if the body / can’t grow wings?” She knows better than to try to tell their tales or predict how their lives might turn out; she’s really just telling her own story of what this world looks like, specifically to her. 

This poem, and others in the book, walk up to that distasteful line that some poems of witness violate—the line of appropriating other people’s stories, mining them for emotion that is second- or third-hand and shouldn’t have been borrowed in the first place. But this poem and this book don’t cross that line. As the reader, you never forget that this writer is a stranger in this land, and that she gets to leave it whenever she wants, and she knows that that privilege sets her apart. And yet we’re not clubbed with that message; the message is embedded, along with a bounty of humanity, in these remarkably graceful poems.

You can buy Punishment right here.

* A tough feat, since that contest gets more than 1,500 chapbook manuscripts submitted each year. I lost again this year and am in good company.

[All through April, I’m featuring a favorite poem every day, along with a link where you can read it. Some are classics, some are newer, but each one is the kind of poem that I read, love, and immediately want to tell all my friends about. What better to time to share them than National Poetry Month?]

30 Great Poems for April, Day 17: “Mimesis” by Fady Joudah

Read “Mimesis” on the Poetry Foundation site here.

Oh, man, that last line.

Fady Joudah is a Palestinian-American physician who was born in Texas, grew up in Libya and Saudi Arabia, and now lives in Houston, where he works as an emergency-room doctor. (His poems have a gentleness that I can only hope bely his bedside manner as a physician.) Somewhere in his busy doctor’s life, he’s found time to publish work in many of the top literary journals, win the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition, and publish several well-received books. I tell you all this because, people: This is a poet you should know about.

And while a poem, generally speaking, should stand on its own, without the scaffolding of the poems around it in the little microcity of a book, or the celebrity of the writer of whatever—yes, still, when you know a little about the poet, sometimes their work is infused with something extra, a deeper-felt appreciation you wouldn’t have otherwise.

And to that, here’s the definition of mimesis (I had to look it up): “imitation, in particular: [meaning 2] the deliberate imitation of the behavior of one group of people by another as a factor in social change. Zoology: another term for mimicry.” There are so many levels of mimicry going on in this poem—spider mimicking human habitation, father mimicking the oppressor, daughter questioning that chain, and ultimately (we sense) father mimicking daughter. And it’s short—so, so short! Think of what he could have cluttered it up with and chose not to.









[All through April, I’m featuring a favorite poem every day, along with a link where you can read it. Some are classics, some are newer, but each one is the kind of poem that I read, love, and immediately want to tell all my friends about. What better to time to share them than National Poetry Month?]