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Poem of the Day

“The Lanyard”

used with permission

The other day I was ricocheting slowly

off the blue walls of this room,

moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano,

from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,

when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary

where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.

No cookie nibbled by a French novelist

could send one into the past more suddenly—

a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp

by a deep Adirondack lake

learning how to braid long thin plastic strips

into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.

I had never seen anyone use a lanyard

or wear one, if that’s what you did with them,

but that did not keep me from crossing

strand over strand again and again

until I had made a boxy

red and white lanyard for my mother.

She gave me life and milk from her breasts,

and I gave her a lanyard.

She nursed me in many a sick room,

lifted spoons of medicine to my lips,

laid cold face-cloths on my forehead,

and then led me out into the airy light

and taught me to walk and swim,

and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.

Here are thousands of meals, she said,

and here is clothing and a good education.

And here is your lanyard, I replied,

which I made with a little help from a counselor.

Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,

strong legs, bones and teeth,

and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,

and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.

And here, I wish to say to her now,

is a smaller gift—not the worn truth

that you can never repay your mother,

but the rueful admission that when she took

the two-tone lanyard from my hand,

I was as sure as a boy could be

that this useless, worthless thing I wove

out of boredom would be enough to make us even.

Copyright Credit: “The Lanyard” from The Trouble With Poetry: and Other Poems by Billy Collins, copyright © 2005 by Billy Collins. Used by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

About the Poet

Billy Collins is one of the most widely read and beloved poets in the United States. Known for his conversational tone, warmth, and gentle humor, Collins served as U.S. Poet Laureate from 2001–2003. His poetry invites readers into moments of everyday life—classrooms, kitchens, memories—where insight and emotional depth quietly unfold. Rather than grand declarations, Collins offers intimacy, attentiveness, and wit as pathways into meaning.

Why This Poem

A gently humorous yet deeply moving meditation on gratitude, humility, and the quiet heroism of caregiving.

In “The Lanyard,” Billy Collins reflects on a childhood craft project and suddenly recognizes the impossibility of repaying a mother for a lifetime of care. The poem reminds us that compassion often lives in ordinary, unrepayable acts—feeding, teaching, listening, loving—performed without expectation of return. Through humor and honesty, Collins helps us sit with gratitude not as obligation, but as reverence.

Reflection Questions

1. What moment in the poem caused you to pause or smile—and why?

2. Can you think of an act of care in your life that cannot truly be “paid back”?

3. How does this poem reshape the way you think about gratitude?

4. Where do you notice quiet, unseen compassion in your everyday life?

5. If you were to offer a symbolic “lanyard” today, who would it be for—and what would it represent?

✨

Invitation to Participate

Share a reflection inspired by the poem

Post a short poem or paragraph responding to today’s theme

Upload a voice note or video reading a favorite line

Respond to another participant with curiosity and kindness

This is a shared space. Read generously. Respond gently.

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April Poetry Month: A Celebration of Compassion

Each April, we pause to honor poetry—not as ornament or escape, but as a way of seeing more clearly, listening more deeply, and remembering who we are to one another.

This year, we invite you into a month-long celebration of Compassion and its many attributes—kindness, courage, humility, resilience, generosity, and care. Through the voices of poets across cultures, generations, and lived experience, we will explore how compassion lives not only in grand gestures, but in ordinary acts, quiet endurance, moral clarity, and shared vulnerability.

Poetry has always been a keeper of human truth. In times of uncertainty, it gives language to what we feel but cannot yet name. It reminds us that compassion is not weakness or sentimentality—it is a disciplined way of paying attention, a commitment to dignity, and a practice that asks something of us.

Throughout April, we will feature one poet each day whose work invites reflection on what it means to live compassionately in a complex world. These poems do not offer easy answers. Instead, they offer presence. They ask us to notice sorrow without turning away, to honor joy without forgetting responsibility, and to imagine a world shaped by courage rather than fear.

We invite you to read slowly. To listen. To sit with a line that stays with you. To share reflections with others. And to carry what you discover here into your daily life—in conversations, choices, and acts of care. May this month of poetry open space for deeper understanding, renewed hope, and a strengthened commitment to compassion as both a personal practice and a shared responsibility.

Welcome to April. Welcome to poetry. Welcome to the work of compassion.

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Introducing Alignment and the Charter for Compassion

This April, Alignment and the Charter for Compassion come together to offer Compassionate Poets—a month-long invitation to reflect, listen, and respond through poetry.

Both Alignment and the Charter for Compassion are rooted in a shared understanding: that compassion is not merely a feeling, but a practice, a discipline, and a responsibility—one that calls us to deepen our awareness of ourselves, one another, and the world we inhabit together.

Alignment supports contemplative practices that foster inner clarity, ethical presence, and wise action. The Charter for Compassion, a global movement active in over 50 countries, works to translate compassion into concrete action across education, health, justice, spirituality, the arts, and community life. The Charter believes that cultural transformation begins not only with policies and programs, but with how we see, speak, and listen.

Poetry has always been one of humanity’s most powerful vessels for compassion. Across cultures and centuries, poets have given language to grief and resilience, love and resistance, tenderness and truth. They help us bear witness—to suffering and beauty alike—and remind us that no experience is ever fully solitary. In times of fracture, poetry becomes a meeting place. In times of uncertainty, it becomes a compass.

Through Compassionate Poets, we are lifting up voices—established and emerging, global and local—whose words invite us to:

See one another more fully

Sit with complexity without turning away

Recognize our shared humanit

Imagine more compassionate ways of living together

https://interfaithalignment.org/

https://charterforcompassion.org/

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Guidelines

You are welcome to contribute in any of the following ways:

Written reflections

A response to the poem or reflection question

A personal story the poem brings to mind

A short original poem

Audio or video

Reading the featured poem aloud

Sharing a spoken reflection

Performing an original poem

Creative responses

Visual art, photography, collage

Handwritten poems or drawings (photographed)

Community engagement

Respond kindly to others’ posts

Ask curious, respectful questions

Honor different perspectives and lived experiences

Community Agreements:

Speak from your own experience

Listen with openness

Avoid debate or correction

No hate speech, harassment, or personal attacks

Moderators may remove posts that harm the spirit of this space

This series is not only about reading poems. It is about participation.

We invite you to consider how compassion—named, practiced, and embodied—might shape the choices we make each day.

May the poems offered in this month give you moments of stillness and courage.

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Your Contribution

Again, welcome to Compassionate Poets. This is a shared space rooted in respect, curiosity, and care.

Throughout the month and hopefully, beyond, you’ll encounter poets from across cultures, generations, and lived experiences—voices that speak to kindness, resilience, grief, justice, love, and hope.

Each day you are invited to:

Read a featured poem

Learn a little about the poet

Reflect through guiding question

Share your own responses—words, images, audio, or video

There is no “right” way to participate. You may post every day, once a week, or simply read and listen.

May these poems and their work open doors to empathy and understanding. And may they remind us that compassion, like poetry, is both ancient and urgently needed now.

May these poems remind us that compassion is not abstract—it is practiced, lived, and shared.

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Poem of the Day

"The Teacher's Prayer"

(La oración de la maestra)

A prayer spoken not for authority or recognition, but for humility, patience, and moral clarity in the presence of children.

Lord, you who taught, forgive me that I teach; forgive me that I bear the name of teacher, the name you bore on earth.

Grant me such devoted love for my school that not even beauty's flame will detract from my faithful tenderness.

Master, make my fervor longlasting and my disillusion brief.

Uproot from me this impure desire for justice that still troubles me, the petty protest that rises up within me when I am hurt. Let not the incomprehension of others trouble me, or the forgetfulness of those I have taught sadden me.

Let me be more maternal than a mother; able to love and defend with all of a mother's fervor the child that is not flesh of my flesh.

Grant that I may be successful in molding one of my pupils into a perfect poem, and let me leave within her my deepestfelt melody that she may sing for you when my lips shall sing no more.

Make me strong in my faith that your Gospel is possible in my time, so that I do not renounce the daily battle to make it live.

Let your luminous radiance descend upon my modest school as it did upon the barefoot children who surrounded you.

Make me strong even in my weakness as a woman, and particularly as a poor woman.

Make me scorn all power that is not pure, and all duress that is not your flaming will upon my life.

About the Poet

Gabriela Mistral (1889–1957) was a Chilean poet, educator, diplomat, and the first Latin American woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature (1945). Deeply shaped by her work as a rural schoolteacher, Mistral wrote with fierce tenderness about children, education, poverty, exile, love, and moral responsibility. Her poetry carries a maternal, ethical voice—one that insists learning is an act of compassion and teaching a sacred trust.

Why This Poem

This poem belongs at the heart of the Compassionate Poets series because it frames education as a moral and spiritual practice of compassion. Mistral’s teacher does not ask for power, brilliance, or success—but for the ability to serve without harming, to teach without pride, and to shape young lives with gentleness and integrity.

“The Teacher’s Prayer” reminds us that compassion often takes the form of daily responsibility—showing up prepared, attentive, and ethically awake. In a world that often undervalues caregivers and educators, Mistral honors teaching as a vocation of love, restraint, and profound influence.

This poem speaks not only to teachers, but to anyone entrusted with others’ growth—parents, mentors, leaders, organizers, elders—anyone whose actions quietly shape the future.

Compassion Lens

This poem highlights compassion as:

Humility rather than authority

Protection rather than control

Moral accountability rather than expertise

Careful presence in everyday work

Reflective Questions

1. Who were the teachers—formal or informal—who shaped you with care?
What qualities did they embody that went beyond knowledge?

2. Mistral’s teacher prays not to wound the soul of a child.
Where in your own life do you carry responsibility for others’ emotional or spiritual well-being?

3. What does compassionate authority look like today?
How can guidance be offered without domination or ego?

4. This poem centers humility as strength.
Where do you see humility as essential to compassion in your work or relationships?

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Poem of the Day

"Evolution"

How, Alan Turing thought, does the soft-walled,

jellied, symmetrical cell

become the asymmetrical horse? It was just before dusk,

the sun's last shafts doubling the fence posts,

all the dark mares on their dark shadows. It was just

after Schrödinger's What is Life?

not long before Watson, Franklin, Crick, not long before

supper. How does a chemical soup,

he asked, give rise to a biological pattern? And how

does a pattern shift, an outer ear

gradually slough its fur, or a shorebird's stubby beak

sharpen toward the trout?

He was halfway between the war's last enigmas

and the cyanide apple—two bites—

that would kill him. Halfway along the taut wires

that hummed between crime

and pardon, indecency and privacy. How do solutions,

chemical, personal, stable, unstable,

harden into shapes? And how do shapes break?

What slips a microfissure

across a lightless cell, until time and matter

double their easy bickering? God?

Chance? A chemical shudder? He was happy and not,

tired and not, humming a bit

with the fence wires. How does a germ split into a self?

And what is a—We are not our acts

and remembrances, Schrödinger wrote. Should something—

God, chance, a chemical shudder?—

sever us from all we have been, still it would not kill us.

It was just before dusk, his segment

of earth slowly ticking toward night. Like time, he thought,

we are almost erased by rotation,

as the dark, symmetrical planet lifts its asymmetrical cargo

up to the sunset: horses, ryegrass—

In no case, then, is there a loss of personal existence to deplore—

marten, whitethroat, blackbird,

lark—nor will there ever be.

Copyright Credit: Linda Bierds, "Evolution" from The Hardy Tree.  Copyright © 2019 by Linda Bierds.  Reprinted by permission of Copper Canyon Press, www.coppercanyonpress.org.

About the Poet

Linda Bierds is an American poet celebrated for her luminous precision, intellectual depth, and contemplative attention to history, science, and the natural world. Her work often inhabits moments of transition—where time, memory, and transformation intersect. Bierds writes with restraint and clarity, inviting readers to consider how meaning emerges not through certainty, but through careful observation and ethical awareness. Her poetry asks us to slow down and to recognize that understanding—like compassion—is shaped over time through patience, humility, and attentiveness.

Why This Poem

Evolution frames compassion through the lens of deep time and shared origin. Rather than focusing on human suffering alone, this poem widens our moral imagination. Bierds invites us to see ourselves as part of a vast, unfolding continuum of life—shaped by chance, adaptation, vulnerability, and survival. In doing so, the poem gently disrupts human-centered narratives and reminds us that compassion begins with recognizing kinship beyond ourselves.

This poem belongs in the Compassionate Poets series because it teaches that compassion is not only interpersonal—it is ecological, temporal, and ethical.

Evolution asks us to consider how awareness of our shared beginnings might change how we live, what we protect, and how gently we treat one another—and the Earth.

Reflective Questions

1. How does thinking in “deep time” affect your sense of responsibility to others?
What shifts when you imagine yourself as part of a long continuum rather than a single moment?

2. Where do you notice kinship with forms of life beyond your own experience?
How might that recognition influence compassion?

3. The poem suggests that change and survival are gradual, fragile processes.
How does this understanding shape patience—with yourself, with others, or with social change?

4. Creative Invitation:
Write a short reflection or poem beginning with:

“Before I was…”

“Long before this moment…”

“We belong to a story that began…”

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Poem of the Day

"untitled" from from Irma Pineda’s sixth collection, Guie’ ni zinebe / La flor que se llevó (Stolen Flower), published by Pluralia (Mexico City, 2013). All the poems in the collection are untitled. They form a single narrative, based on actual events: the 2007 rape and murder of an elderly indigenous woman in rural Veracruz, by Mexican soldiers, and the discovery that soldiers had also raped young girls in the community.

Who are we now?
If the glow of rainbow threads we wore
has been covered by mud
to hide us from the poisonous
glare you sling
who is hurt by your fiery breath?
You might knock me down
…………..I will fall
but let me tell you
Others will rise up and defy you

Peace was always our sister
until evil
eviscerated the earth
with its greed
Our cowering in the corner wasn’t enough
our silent pain did not satisfy
the thousand sly devils
dug up her body
to erase our history
and then decree
that we never lived on this earth

You came with strangers to pound the grass
that only knows our feet
You blinded the sun
that had only gazed on my footprints
you slithered into the trees
to try and trick us
You think the world is too weak
to escape your hate
you think the jungle too small to shelter us
because you stole her colors to dye your clothes
and use her leaves to hide from my brothers
…………….Ay soldier
you don’t care that
this is our house
this is our mother and daughter
we know every inch of her skin
just by smelling her scent
she doesn’t want you inside her
and so
you will have no peace

Poem Summary

In this poem, Irma Pineda speaks to loss—not as something abstract, but as something lived in the body, the land, and language itself. The poem reflects on disappearance, grief, and endurance, especially within Indigenous communities affected by violence, erasure, and displacement. Yet it is not only a poem of mourning; it is also a poem of presence.

About the Poet

Irma Pineda Santiago is an Indigenous Zapotec poet and writer from Juchitán, Oaxaca, Mexico. She writes in Isthmus Zapotec and Spanish, and her work centers on memory, language preservation, women’s voices, land, and cultural survival. In 2019, she became the first Indigenous woman elected as an expert member of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. Her poetry is an act of cultural continuity, and resistance.

Why This Poem

This poem embodies compassion as witness. Irma Pineda writes from the Zapotec understanding that language, land, and people are inseparable. Compassion here is not sentimental—it is an ethical act of remembering those who have been lost and refusing to let silence finish the work of violence. In a time when many communities experience erasure—cultural, political, ecological—this poem reminds us that compassion includes:

honoring grief without turning away,

listening to voices rooted in ancestral memory,

and recognizing survival itself as a sacred act.

Reflective Questions

1. What does it mean to “remain” in the face of loss?
Where in your own life or community have you seen quiet endurance?

2. How does remembering become an act of compassion?
Who or what are you being asked not to forget?

3. Irma Pineda writes from a worldview where language and land are alive.
What places or languages hold your own memories?

4. Where do you see compassion as resistance today?
What does it look like to refuse erasure with gentleness and strength?

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Poem of the Day

Angels of Better Days to Come

used with permission

Rockets of blind faith
sputter and crackle dead dreams-
like time bleeding stars.

Through soft painted moans
a man watches his life drown
in waves of glass bones.

Celestial winds
blow chilled screams for love's mercy
down canyons of dread.

Through bright haunted smiles
a woman hums white magic-
sings pain into pearls.

Reflections of self
in multiple dimensions
whirl across the sky.

Machine guns fire knives
that slice the world's bloody tears
like bits of strange fruit.

Throbbing blue rhythms,
a torn heart wrestles naked
with wounds from the past.

Black holes coalesce
into mounds of burned feathers
and crucified trust.

Between death and hell
a bridge shining silver wings
offers his soul hope.

That good gardener,
who wept thorns plowing his fields-
harvests grace with joy.

About the Poet

Aberjhani is an American poet, essayist, and cultural historian whose work explores themes of justice, memory, resilience, and spiritual transformation. Writing at the intersections of African American history, global conflict, and inner life, his poetry confronts violence and trauma while steadfastly affirming the possibility of renewal.

Aberjhani’s work is known for its lyrical intensity and moral imagination. He does not shy away from naming cruelty or injustice, yet his poems consistently search for pathways toward healing, dignity, and hope. His writing invites readers to see compassion not as escape from suffering, but as a force capable of reshaping it.

Why This Poem

“Angels of Better Days to Come” belongs in the Compassionate Poets series because it embodies compassion as transformation.

The poem moves through landscapes of violence, loss, racial terror, and broken trust. Its images are stark and unsettling, refusing to soften the realities of war, fanaticism, and historical trauma. Yet the poem does not end in despair. Instead, it insists that compassion can emerge precisely where devastation seems absolute.

Through acts of imagination—singing pain into pearls, harvesting grace with joy—the poem suggests that compassion is not denial of suffering, but the courageous labor of converting grief into meaning and endurance. Hope appears not as fantasy, but as a fragile bridge built between despair and possibility.

This poem teaches that compassion can be fierce, imaginative, and spiritual—capable of holding grief while still reaching toward a more humane future.

Reflective Questions

1. Where do you see compassion at work in this poem, even amid violence and despair?
What moments suggest care, transformation, or moral courage?

2. Which image or line affected you most strongly—and why?
What does it ask you to confront or remember?

3. The poem speaks of “singing pain into pearls.”
Where have you seen suffering transformed into wisdom, creativity, or resilience—personally or collectively?

4. How does imagination function as a compassionate act in this poem?
In what ways can creativity help heal wounds that logic or power cannot?

5. Creative Invitation:
Write a short reflection or poem beginning with:

“Between despair and hope…”

“What I refuse to surrender…”

“The angel I did not expect…”

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Poem of the Day

A Selection from Ukranian Blues

We need corridors:

Alone in the grief of breathing.  Nuclear silos rolled out.  Walking Dream Boulevard.

The unreadable pages of sky

In this field, every language is foreign

Every song starts from zero: the snow-ghosts of war

Converge

From albino woods

Where one continent shades into another the passengers disagree (Pink tulle, soap bubbles burst)

So on you & me, darling, the cold of the war comes down

We’ve drawn ourselves to full height but even kneeling one cannot at closest range be altered by someone else’s breathing.

HITHERTO UNFOUND documents

Raspberry tea stains

Flowers alongside death dates. We are not the kind who leave our dead behind

Soldiers in snow.

Piano keys

A dark dirge. My internal funeral.

A stark memoir of how power could spin

Love can push a nuclear button: flowers go off, radioactive petals

Letters in sepia script look at that child-scare, two under three with nuclear plant in background of painting and holding their Scare-Bear.

About the Poet

Lynn Strongin is an American poet whose work bears unflinching witness to war, power, and the fragile persistence of human dignity. Her poetry is known for its lyrical intensity, moral clarity, and refusal to aestheticize violence. Drawing on history, politics, and intimate human experience, Strongin’s writing confronts the mechanisms of domination—militarism, nuclear threat, erasure—while insisting on remembrance and responsibility. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and collections, and she is widely respected for poetry that does not look away from suffering, yet never relinquishes the human presence within it. Ukrainian Blues stands as a stark, urgent response to contemporary war, written in fragments that mirror the shattered realities it describes.

Strongin’s poetry embodies a form of compassion rooted in witness, truth-telling, and moral courage.

Why These Selections Matter

The selections from Ukrainian Blues are vital to the Compassionate Poets series because they insist that compassion is not always gentle, comforting, or resolved. Here, compassion takes the form of staying present with grief, refusing to abandon the dead, and naming the realities of war without euphemism.

These poems remind us that compassion includes:

Bearing witness when language breaks down

Holding memory against forces that seek erasure

Recognizing the human cost embedded in systems of power

Refusing silence in the face of nuclear and military violence

Strongin’s fragmentary style reflects the lived experience of trauma and war—where coherence fractures, meaning is interrupted, and ordinary objects (flowers, tea stains, letters, children’s toys) carry unbearable weight. Her work challenges readers to remain ethically awake, even when clarity is painful. In this way, Strongin expands the series’ understanding of compassion beyond kindness or reconciliation alone, into the realm of moral vigilance and shared responsibility.

Reflective Questions

1. What does it mean to witness suffering without trying to resolve it?
How does this challenge or deepen your understanding of compassion?

2. Which image or line stayed with you the longest?
What do you think it asks you to remember or carry forward?

3. Where do you see human presence persisting within systems of violence or power in these selections?

4. What responsibilities do we have to those who suffer at a distance—from war, nuclear threat, or political decisions made beyond their control?

5. How might compassion function not as comfort, but as refusal—to forget, to look away, or to remain silent?

These poems ask us to practice compassion not as reassurance, but as attention—to grief, to memory, and to the lives that power would prefer remain unseen.

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Poem of the Day

"Where the Mind Is Without Fear"

(from Gitanjali, Tagore’s own English translation)

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;

Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls;

Where words come out from the depth of truth;

Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;

Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;

Where the mind is led forward by thee

Into ever-widening thought and action—

Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

About the Poet

Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) was a poet, philosopher, educator, composer, and public intellectual whose work reshaped modern literature and political imagination across cultures. Writing originally in Bengali and often translating his own work into English, Tagore brought South Asian spiritual, ethical, and humanist traditions into global conversation.

He was the first non-European to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature (1913), awarded for Gitanjali, a collection of poems that speak to freedom, dignity, and the moral awakening of humanity. Though deeply critical of nationalism when it hardened into exclusion or domination, Tagore believed passionately in freedom of thought, ethical courage, education, and cultural exchange.

“Where the Mind Is Without Fear” stands as one of his most enduring poems—a prayer not just for India, but for any society seeking to rise beyond fear, fragmentation, and complacency into a shared moral freedom.

Why This Poem

“Where the Mind Is Without Fear” is a prayer for the moral conditions that make compassion possible. Rabindranath Tagore reminds us that compassion cannot flourish where fear governs thought, where truth is constrained, or where human dignity is divided by narrow loyalties.

This poem calls us toward moral courage—the courage to think freely, to speak truthfully, and to imagine a society grounded not in domination or habit, but in reason, humility, and shared responsibility. Tagore frames compassion not as sentiment, but as a public ethic: one that depends on education, openness, and the willingness to resist fragmentation in favor of collective dignity.

At a time when fear, misinformation, and polarization threaten both personal integrity and democratic life, this poem invites us to ask what it means to awaken—not only as individuals, but as communities and nations.

It is a reminder that freedom of mind and compassion of heart are inseparable, and that both must be practiced if a just and humane future is to emerge.

Reflective Questions

1. What does “a mind without fear” mean in your own life right now?

Where do you notice fear limiting truth, creativity, or compassion?

2. Tagore writes of a world “not broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls.”

What are the “walls” you see today—social, political, cultural, or psychological—that divide rather than protect?

3. When have you experienced knowledge as something “free”?

What conditions make learning, dialogue, or truth-sharing possible—and what threatens them?

4. The poem links dignity with truth spoken “from the depth.”

What does it take to speak truth with compassion rather than aggression or silence?

5. Tagore contrasts “tireless striving” with “dead habit.”

Where in your life—or in society—has habit replaced thoughtful action?
What would it look like to reawaken intention there?

6. The poem ends as a collective prayer: “let my country awake.”

What does awakening look like in your community today?
Who helps awaken it—and how?

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Poem of the Day

"Strange Meeting"

It seemed that out of battle I escaped

Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped

Through granites which titanic wars had groined.

Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned,

Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.

Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared

With piteous recognition in fixed eyes,

Lifting distressful hands, as if to bless.

And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall,—

By his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell.

With a thousand fears that vision's face was grained;

Yet no blood reached there from the upper ground,

And no guns thumped, or down the flues made moan.

“Strange friend,” I said, “here is no cause to mourn.”

“None,” said that other, “save the undone years,

The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours,

Was my life also; I went hunting wild

After the wildest beauty in the world,

Which lies not calm in eyes, or braided hair,

But mocks the steady running of the hour,

And if it grieves, grieves richlier than here.

For by my glee might many men have laughed,

And of my weeping something had been left,

Which must die now. I mean the truth untold,

The pity of war, the pity war distilled.

Now men will go content with what we spoiled.

Or, discontent, boil bloody, and be spilled.

They will be swift with swiftness of the tigress.

None will break ranks, though nations trek from progress.

Courage was mine, and I had mystery;

Wisdom was mine, and I had mastery:

To miss the march of this retreating world

Into vain citadels that are not walled.

Then, when much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels,

I would go up and wash them from sweet wells,

Even with truths that lie too deep for taint.

I would have poured my spirit without stint

But not through wounds; not on the cess of war.

Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were.

“I am the enemy you killed, my friend.

I knew you in this dark: for so you frowned

Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.

I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.

Let us sleep now. . . .”

Source: The Poems of Wilfred Owen, edited by Jon Stallworthy (W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1986)

About the Poet

Wilfred Owen (1893–1918) was an English poet and soldier whose work stands among the most powerful literary responses to war ever written. Serving in World War I, Owen experienced the brutal realities of trench warfare firsthand. His poetry rejects romanticized notions of heroism, instead bearing witness to the psychological and moral devastation of modern conflict.

Why This Poem

“Strange Meeting” is one of the most radical acts of compassion in modern poetry. In this poem, Wilfred Owen imagines an encounter between enemies beyond the battlefield—where violence has ceased, and truth can finally be spoken. By allowing empathy to cross the deepest divide imaginable, Owen challenges the logic that dehumanization is inevitable or necessary in war. At a time when conflict is often framed through slogans, fear, or abstraction, “Strange Meeting” insists that compassion begins with truth-telling, moral reckoning, and the courage to see the other as fully human.

Reflective Questions

1. What does it mean to recognize the humanity of someone labeled an enemy?
Where do you notice resistance to that recognition—and why?

2. The poem imagines understanding after violence has occurred.
What might compassion look like when harm cannot be undone?

3. What are the costs—personal or collective—of dehumanization?
How do those costs show up beyond war, in everyday life?

4. Creative Invitation:
Write a reflection, poem, or short statement beginning with:

“If we met beyond the battlefield…”

“What I wish I had said…”

“What remains after the fighting stops…”

Community Invitation

This poem asks us to sit with discomfort and complexity. Read one another’s reflections with care.

Respond gently.

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Poem of the Day

"Wild Geese"

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

© by owner. provided at no charge for educational purposes

About the Poet

Mary Oliver (1935–2019) was one of the most beloved poets of the modern era, known for her clear, accessible language and profound attentiveness to the natural world. Her work invites readers to notice what is alive around them—animals, landscapes, seasons—and to understand these encounters as sources of wisdom, healing, and belonging.

Oliver’s poetry often bridges solitude and community, inner life and outer world. Rather than prescribing answers, she offers invitations: to pay attention, to listen, and to remember that we are not separate from the living world, but part of it.

Why This Poem

“Wild Geese” reframes compassion as belonging rather than self-improvement.

In a culture that often equates worth with achievement, perfection, or moral purity, this poem gently releases the reader from shame. Mary Oliver does not ask us to be better versions of ourselves; she asks us to recognize that we already belong—to the earth, to the family of living things, and to one another.

This poem belongs in the Compassionate Poets series because it teaches that compassion begins with kindness toward oneself, and that self-acceptance is not indulgence but a foundation for genuine connection. By reminding us that we are held within a wider web of life, “Wild Geese” offers solace, inclusion, and a sense of home—especially for those who feel isolated or unworthy.

Attributes of Compassion Highlighted

Kindness toward self

Inclusion without conditions

Connection to the living world

Release from shame

Reflective Questions

1. What expectations or standards does this poem invite you to lay down?
How does it feel to imagine belonging without earning it?

2. Where in your life do you most need permission to be exactly as you are?
What would change if you offered yourself that permission?

3. The poem places human life within the wider family of nature.
When have you felt most connected to the living world?

4. How does compassion toward yourself affect how you show up for others?
What happens when self-kindness replaces self-judgment?

5. Creative Invitation:
Write a reflection or poem beginning with:

“You only have to…”

“I belong when…”

“The world says…”

Community Invitation

Let this poem offer you rest. Read others’ reflections with openness. Respond with gentleness. Add your voice to this shared reminder that none of us walks alone.

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Poem of the Day

"Still I Rise"

You may write me down in history

With your bitter, twisted lies,

You may trod me in the very dirt

But still, like dust, I'll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you?

Why are you beset with gloom?

’Cause I walk like I've got oil wells

Pumping in my living room.

Just like moons and like suns,

With the certainty of tides,

Just like hopes springing high,

Still I'll rise.

Did you want to see me broken?

Bowed head and lowered eyes?

Shoulders falling down like teardrops,

Weakened by my soulful cries?

Does my haughtiness offend you?

Don't you take it awful hard

’Cause I laugh like I've got gold mines

Diggin’ in my own backyard.

You may shoot me with your words,

You may cut me with your eyes,

You may kill me with your hatefulness,

But still, like air, I’ll rise.

Does my sexiness upset you?

Does it come as a surprise

That I dance like I've got diamonds

At the meeting of my thighs?

Out of the huts of history’s shame

I rise

Up from a past that’s rooted in pain

I rise

I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide,

Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.

Leaving behind nights of terror and fear

I rise

Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear

I rise

Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,

I am the dream and the hope of the slave.

I rise

I rise

I rise.

Copyright Credit: Maya Angelou, "Still I Rise" from And Still I Rise: A Book of Poems.  Copyright © 1978 by Maya Angelou.  Used by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

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Poem of the Day

"The World Grows Blackthorn Walls"

Tall, stiff and spiny.

Try to make it to the other side

and risk savage thorns.

We who left home in our teens,

children who crossed boundaries and were torn

by its thousand serrated tongues,

we who bear scars that bloom and bloom

beneath healed skins,

who have we become?

I ask myself:

Is home my ghost?

Does it wear my underwear

folded neatly in the antique chest

of drawers I bought twenty years ago,

nest inside my blouse that hangs

from one metal hanger I cannot discard?

Is it lost between these lines of books

shelved alphabetical in a language

I was not born to? Or here on the lip

of this chipped cup

my last lover left behind?

I carry seeds in my mouth. Plant

turmeric, cardamom, and tiny

aromatic cucumbers in this garden.

Water them with rain I wring

from my grandmother’s songs.

They will grow, I know, against

these blackthorn walls.

They can push through anything, uncut.

I left home at thirteen.

I hadn’t lived enough to know how

not to love.

Home was the Caspian Sea, the busy bazaars,

the aroma of kebab and rice, Friday

lunches, picnics by mountain streams.

I never meant to stay away.

They said come back

and you will die.

Exile is a suitcase with a broken strap.

I fill up a hundred notebooks with scribbles,

throw them into fire and begin again,

this time tattooing the words on my forehead,

this time writing only not to forget.

Complacency is catching like the common cold.

I swim upstream to lay my purple eggs.

They say draw sustenance from this land,

but look how my fruits hang in spirals

and smell of old notebooks and lace.

What is a transplanted tree

but a time being

who has adapted to adoption?

Spirits urge and spirits go,

they weep and wail at the door of the temple

where I sit at the edge of an abyss.

Perhaps it’s only in exile that spirits arrive.

But even this is an illusion.

Copyright Credit: Sholeh Wolpe, "The World Grows Blackthorn Walls" from Abacus of Loss.  Copyright © 2022 by Sholeh Wolpe.

About the Poet

Sholeh Wolpé is an Iranian-American poet, writer, and literary translator whose work gives voice to exile, memory, displacement, and the quiet persistence of the human spirit. Born in Iran and forced into exile as a teenager following the Iranian Revolution, Wolpé has spent much of her life navigating the in-between spaces of language, culture, and belonging. Her poetry is deeply sensorial and fiercely tender, weaving personal history with collective experience. Through images of food, landscape, inherited song, and the body itself, she explores what it means to survive rupture without surrendering love, creativity, or moral imagination. Wolpé’s work reminds us that compassion is often forged not in comfort, but in endurance—and that remembering can itself be an act of resistance.

Why This Poem

“The World Grows Blackthorn Walls” is a profound meditation on exile—not only as geographic displacement, but as a lifelong condition of the heart and spirit.

This poem belongs in a series on compassion because it does not ask for pity. Instead, it invites recognition. Wolpé shows us how people carry home inside their bodies, languages, and rituals long after borders have closed behind them. Compassion here is not sentimental; it is muscular, seeded, stubborn. It grows “against blackthorn walls.”

The poem speaks to:

the courage of those who cross boundaries too young,

the scars that “bloom and bloom beneath healed skins,”

the resilience of memory, culture, and love under threat,

and the radical act of continuing to create—to write, to plant, to sing—in the face of erasure.

In a world increasingly shaped by forced migration, exile, and silencing, this poem offers compassion as witness and continuance: a refusal to forget, and a refusal to stop loving.

Reflection Questions

You are invited to sit with one or two of these questions—or to let the poem lead you somewhere else entirely.

Inner Reflection

What lines or images linger with you after reading this poem?

Where do you feel the tension between loss and endurance in your own life?

Belonging & Identity

What does “home” mean to you beyond a physical place?

Have you ever carried pieces of home inside you—objects, songs, tastes, habits—that helped you survive change or separation?

Compassion & Witness

How does this poem expand your understanding of exile—not only for refugees, but for anyone who has been uprooted, silenced, or forced to adapt?

What kind of compassion is required to truly see those living in exile today?

Creative Invitation

Write a few lines beginning with:
“I carry seeds in my mouth…”

Or share an image, sound, or memory that represents something you have carried through difficulty.

Closing Invitation

This is a space for listening, remembering, and responding with care. Share what you feel called to—words, images, voice, or silence. All are welcome here.

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Poem of the Day

"It is Dawn"

used with permission

The sun is conquering the sky
and my grandmother and I
are heaving prayers at the horizon.

“Show me something unbeautiful,” she says,
“Try it.”

“If you can then there is a veil
over your eyes and I will take it away
You will see hozhó all around you.
Inside of you.”

This morning my grandmother is teaching me the meaning of hozhó.
There is no direct translation from Diné Bizaad,
the Navajo language, into English
but every living being knows what hozhó means.
Hozhó is every drop of rain
every leaf on every tree
it is your every eyelash
it is every feather on the bluebird’s wing
Hozhó is undeniable beauty.

Hozhó is in every breath that we give to the trees.
And in every breath they give to us in return.
Hozhó is reciprocity.

My grandmother knows this well.
For she speaks a language that grew up and out of the desert floor
like red sandstone monoliths that rise like the arms of the earth
reaching into the sky and
praising creation for all its brilliance.

Hozhó is remembering that you are a part of this brilliance.
It is finally accepting that, yes, you are a sacred song that
brings the Diyin Dine’é, the gods, to their knees
in an almost unbearable ecstasy.
Hozhó is remembering your own beauty.

My grandmother knows this well.
For she speaks the language of a Lók’aa’ch’égai snowstorm.
She speaks the language of hooves hitting the dirt on birthdays.
For my grandmother was a midwife and would
gallop to the hogaans where the women were in labor.
Now she is fluent in the
language of suffering mothers,
fluent in the language of joyful mothers,
fluent in the language of handing a glowing newborn to its creator.

Hozhó is an experience.
But it is not something you can experience alone
the eagles tell us as they
lock talons in the stratosphere
and fall to the earth as one
during courting season.
Hozhó is a form of interbeauty . . .

My grandmother knows this well
for she speaks the same language as the male rain
which shoots lightning boys through the sky,
pummels the green corn children,
and huddles the horses against cliff sides in the early afternoon.

She also speaks the language of the female rain
which sends the scent of dust and sage into our homes
and shoots rainbows out of and into the earth.

Us Diné, we know what hozhó means!
And you, you know what hozhó means.
And deep down we know what hozhó does not mean.

Like the days we walk in sadness.
The days we live for money.
The days we live for fame.

Or like the day that the conquistadors came
climbed down from their horses
and asked if they could buy the mountains.

Now, we knew this was not hozhó
because we knew you cannot buy a mountain
but we knew we could make it hozhó once again.

So we took their silver swords
and we took their silver coins
and we melted them
with fire and buffalo hide bellows
and recast them into squash blossom
turquoise and silver jewelry pieces
and strung it around their necks.
We took the silver helmets straight off their heads
and transformed it into a fearless beauty.
We made jewelry.
Hozhó is the healing of broken bones.

Hozhó is the prayer that carried us
through genocide and disease,
It is the prayer that will carry us through global warming
through this global fear that casts shadows on the walls of our minds.

This morning my grandmother is
teaching me something very important!
She is teaching me that the easiest
(and most elegant) way
to defeat an army of hatred
is to sing it beautiful songs until it falls
to its knees and surrenders.

It will do this, she says, because it has finally
found a sweeter fire than revenge.
It has found heaven.
It has found hozhó.

And so this morning my grandmother is talking
to the colors of the sky at dawn, saying:

hózhónáházdlíí’
hózhónáházdlíí’
hózhónáházdlíí’
hózhónáházdlíí’

Which means:
beauty is restored again . .

.

It is dawn, my friends.
Wake up.
The night is over.

About the Poet

Lyla June Johnston is a Diné (Navajo), Tsétsêhéstâhese (Cheyenne), and European descendant whose work bridges poetry, music, scholarship, and activism. She is a powerful voice for Indigenous rights, cultural resilience, and healing—drawing on ancestral knowledge while addressing contemporary issues such as climate justice, land stewardship, and intergenerational responsibility. Lyla June holds degrees from Stanford University, the University of New Mexico, and is pursuing doctoral work focused on Indigenous studies and sustainability. Her work invites deep listening—to the land, to history, and to one another.

Why This Poem

This poem offers one of the most expansive and embodied visions of compassion in the series. Through the teaching of her grandmother, Lyla June introduces hoz̨hó—a Diné concept often translated as harmony, beauty, balance, and right relationship—but ultimately revealed as something far deeper: a lived, shared, and restorative way of being.

Compassion here is not abstract or individual. It is reciprocity with the Earth, reverence for ancestry, and responsibility to future generations. The poem reminds us that beauty is not ornamental—it is healing, resistance, and survival. In the face of violence, greed, colonization, and climate crisis, hoz̨hó becomes a compassionate practice that transforms harm without replicating it.

Reflective Questions

1. Where do you experience beauty as healing in your own life?
How has beauty—through nature, music, relationship, or memory—helped you endure or transform pain?

2. What does “reciprocity” mean to you?
How do you understand your relationship with the land, your community, or the generations before and after you?

3. The poem teaches that hoz̨hó cannot be experienced alone.
Where do you see compassion as something communal rather than individual?

4. What stories or teachings have elders, ancestors, or mentors passed down to you?
How do those teachings shape how you live, love, or respond to injustice?

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Poem of the Day

Not Just Passing

Translated by Huda Fakhreddine

Yesterday, a star said

to the little light in my heart,

We are not just transients

passing.

Do not die. Beneath this glow

some wanderers go on

walking.

You were first created out of love,

so carry nothing but love

to those who are trembling.

One day, all gardens sprouted

from our names, from what remained

of hearts yearning.

And since it came of age, this ancient language

has taught us how to heal others

with our longing,

how to be a heavenly scent

to relax their tightening lungs: a welcome sigh,

a gasp of oxygen.

Softly, we pass over wounds,

like purposeful gauze, a hint of relief,

an aspirin.

O little light in me, don’t die,

even if all the galaxies of the world

close in.

O little light in me, say:

Enter my heart in peace.

All of you, come in!

About the Poet

Hiba Abu Nada (1991–2023) was a Palestinian poet, novelist, and essayist from Gaza whose writing speaks with luminous tenderness amid profound hardship. Her work is marked by spiritual clarity, moral gentleness, and a deep commitment to human dignity. Writing from within conditions of siege and violence, Abu Nada refused despair, choosing instead to affirm love, presence, and care as essential acts of resistance. She was killed by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza.

Her poetry does not shout; it breathes. It offers consolation without denial and hope without illusion. Through images of light, breath, gardens, and healing, she reminds readers that even in the most constricted circumstances, humanity can choose compassion.

Why This Poem

“Not Just Passing” embodies compassion as presence that refuses erasure. In this poem, Hiba Abu Nada speaks to the fragile light within each person and insists that we are not merely transients moving through suffering. We are created out of love, she tells us—and therefore carry a responsibility to offer love, breath, and care to those who are trembling.

Compassion here is intimate and embodied: it is oxygen for tightening lungs, gentle gauze over wounds, a whispered invitation to enter in peace. The poem does not deny the reality of fear, violence, or encroaching darkness, but it insists that light—however small—must not be surrendered.

This poem belongs in the Compassionate Poets series because it teaches that compassion can be soft and fierce at once. It shows how presence, tenderness, and welcome become acts of moral courage when the world closes in.

Attributes of Compassion Highlighted

Presence rather than passing

Care for the vulnerable

Love as moral responsibility

Hope without denial

Hospitality of the heart

Reflective Questions for Participant Engagement

Participants are invited to respond in writing, audio, video, artwork, or poetry.

1. What does it mean to be “not just passing” in the life of another person?
Where are you being invited to stay, accompany, or witness?

2. The poem describes compassion as breath—oxygen offered to others.
Who has helped you breathe during difficult times?
How might you offer that kind of presence now?

3. What is the “little light” within you that this poem asks you not to let die?
How do you protect it when circumstances feel overwhelming?

4. The poem speaks of healing through longing and gentleness.
How does this differ from more forceful ideas of change or justice?

5. Creative Invitation:
Write a short reflection or poem beginning with:

“O little light in me…”

“I carry love when…”

“Enter my heart in peace…”

Community Invitation

Let this poem be a place of rest and resolve. Read others’ reflections with care. Respond with kindness. Add your own light to this shared space of compassion.

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Poem of the Day

Earth Rise (an excerpt)

And while this is a training,
in sustaining the future of our planet,
There is no rehearsal. The time is
Now
Now
Now,
Because the reversal of harm,
And protection of a future so universal
Should be anything but controversial.
So, earth, pale blue dot
We will fail you not.

About the Poet

Amanda Gorman is an American poet, essayist, and activist whose work centers on climate justice, racial equity, democracy, and collective responsibility. She first gained global recognition as the youngest inaugural poet in U.S. history at the 2021 presidential inauguration, where her poem The Hill We Climb called the world toward healing and courageous action.

Gorman’s poetry is marked by moral urgency and lyrical accessibility. Drawing on spoken-word traditions and civic imagination, she speaks directly to this generation—and those to come—about what it means to inherit a wounded world and still choose responsibility, hope, and action. Her work insists that compassion is not passive feeling, but participation in shaping a just future.

Why This Poem

This excerpt from “Earth Rise” belongs in a series on compassion because it reframes compassion as immediacy.

Gorman refuses distance, delay, or abstraction. Climate justice is not a rehearsal, not a theoretical debate, not a problem for “someday.” Compassion here is decisively now—repeated, urgent, unrelenting.

By naming the Earth as a “pale blue dot,” she reminds us of our shared vulnerability and interdependence. By declaring that protecting a universal future “should be anything but controversial,” she exposes how moral clarity has been clouded by convenience and denial.

This poem calls us to recognize that compassion for the Earth is inseparable from compassion for one another—and that inaction is itself a choice with consequences.

Reflection Questions

Take a moment to breathe. Let the repetition of now echo before responding.

Inner Reflection

What emotions arise when you read the word “now” repeated in this poem?

Where in your life do you feel a similar urgency—something that cannot be postponed?

Collective Responsibility

What does it mean to think of climate action as compassion in practice?

Why do you think Gorman insists that protecting our shared future should not be controversial?

Courage & Accountability

What harms—personal, social, or environmental—do you feel called to help reverse?

Where might fear, habit, or overwhelm be keeping you from acting?

Creative Invitation

Write a short response beginning with:
“Now is the moment when…”

Or share a word, image, or short video that represents what you are protecting for future generations.

Closing Invitation

Compassion is not preparation—it is participation. There is no rehearsal. We are already on the stage. You are invited to respond in whatever way feels true: reflection, poetry, art, voice, or silence held with intention.

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Poem of the Day

"The Table"

I was abandoned
alongside a crab filled with red ants
later they were powder to make paint with nopal juice.
On the table scratched by the gouger: xilographia furrowing the silence
upon bilingual and brown skins.
Back then there was distance
And geography didn’t benefit the word.
Beneath the tiger’s hill
I searched for a treasure to tame fear
and an igneous liquid erased from my left eye
all the flowers I’ve seen in May.

About the Poet

Natalia Toledo is a celebrated Mexican poet, writer, and cultural advocate from Juchitán, Oaxaca, writing primarily in Zapotec and Spanish. Her work is deeply rooted in Indigenous knowledge, land, memory, and language preservation. Beyond poetry, Toledo has been an influential voice in defending Indigenous rights, linguistic survival, and cultural dignity in the face of globalization and erasure.

Her poems often move between myth and lived experience, body and landscape, ancestry and the present moment. Writing in a language historically marginalized, Toledo’s work is itself an act of compassion—toward ancestors, toward future generations, and toward the living earth that holds their stories.

Why This Poem

“The Table” belongs in a series on compassion because it confronts what is at risk when language, land, and memory are wounded—and what it takes to tend those wounds.

This poem does not offer comfort easily. It speaks from abandonment, from scraped surfaces, from “bilingual and brown skins” marked by history. The table becomes a site of inscription—where silence is carved, where identity is scratched into being, where culture is both damaged and preserved.

Compassion here is not sentimental. It is attentive. It listens to what has been scraped away and what still remains. Toledo reminds us that geography, language, and belonging are not neutral—they either nourish the word or starve it. To care is to notice this truth and to act in response.

By placing Zapotec experience alongside global literary echoes, Toledo insists that Indigenous memory is not peripheral—it is central to our shared human story.

Reflection Questions

Sit with the poem slowly. Let its textures—mud, ants, paint, silence—settle before responding.

Inner Reflection

What images or lines from this poem stay with you?

Where do you sense loss, and where do you sense endurance?

Language & Voice

What does this poem suggest about the relationship between language and survival?

Are there words, languages, or stories in your own life that feel endangered or fragile?

Place & Belonging

How does geography “benefit” or fail the word in your own experience?

Where have you felt rooted—and where have you felt abandoned?

Creative Invitation

Write a few lines beginning with:
“On the table of my memory…”

Or reflect on an object, place, or language that has carried your identity through change.

Closing Invitation

Compassion begins by paying attention to what has been scratched, silenced, or nearly forgotten. You are invited to respond with reflection, poetry, memory, image, or voice. This space honors all forms of careful listening.

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Poem of the Day

"Keeping Quiet"

Now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still
for once on the face of the earth,
let’s not speak in any language;
let’s stop for a second,
and not move our arms so much.

It would be an exotic moment
without rush, without engines;
we would all be together
in a sudden strangeness.

Fishermen in the cold sea
would not harm whales
and the man gathering salt
would not look at his hurt hands.

Those who prepare green wars,
wars with gas, wars with fire,
victories with no survivors,
would put on clean clothes
and walk about with their brothers
in the shade, doing nothing.

What I want should not be confused
with total inactivity.
Life is what it is about;
I want no truck with death.

If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with death.
Perhaps the earth can teach us
as when everything seems dead
and later proves to be alive.

Now I’ll count up to twelve
and you keep quiet and I will go.

About the Poet

Pablo Neruda (1904–1973) was a Chilean poet, diplomat, and Nobel Prize laureate whose work spans love, politics, nature, and human solidarity. Writing across decades of social upheaval, Neruda believed poetry should be accessible and rooted in lived experience. His later poems increasingly turned toward ethical responsibility—urging humanity to pause, reflect, and reimagine its relationship to one another and the Earth.

Neruda served as a senator and diplomat and lived much of his life in exile. His poetry reflects a deep concern for justice, dignity, and the shared fate of humankind.

Why This Poem

Keeping Quiet embodies compassion as collective moral awareness.

Neruda asks us to pause not to escape the world, but to heal it—to interrupt cycles of destruction, productivity without conscience, and thoughtless harm. In this poem, compassion is an active stance:

choosing reflection over reaction

recognizing our shared vulnerability

understanding that stillness can be a form of resistance

At a time when urgency dominates public life, Neruda reminds us that ethical clarity often begins in silence.

Attributes of Compassion Highlighted

Collective responsibility

Nonviolence

Mindful awareness

Shared humanity

Ecological consciousness

Reflective Questions

1. What does “keeping quiet” mean in your own life—not as avoidance, but as awareness?

2. Where might a pause interrupt harm—personally, socially, or globally?

3. How does silence differ from indifference? When can it become an act of compassion?

4. What patterns—of speech, action, or habit—might benefit from a moment of stillness?

5. How could collective reflection help restore dignity, connection, or balance in today’s world?

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Poem of the Day

Kindness

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

From Words Under the Words: Selected Poems. Copyright © 1995 by Naomi Shihab Nye. Reprinted with the permission of the author.

About the Poet

Naomi Shihab Nye is a Palestinian American poet, essayist, and educator whose work is celebrated for its clarity, warmth, and deep moral attentiveness. Born to a Palestinian father and an American mother, Nye has spent her career building bridges across cultures, geographies, and generations through poetry and teaching.

Her writing often draws from everyday moments—travel, family stories, small encounters—to reveal how empathy, grief, and generosity shape human connection. Nye’s poems are widely read and taught because they speak directly and honestly, inviting readers into reflection without abstraction or pretense. She is a tireless advocate for poetry as a tool for peace, understanding, and shared humanity.

Why This Poem

“Kindness” offers one of the clearest and most honest explorations of compassion in contemporary poetry.

Rather than presenting kindness as a simple virtue, Naomi Shihab Nye insists that true kindness is born from knowing loss. The poem acknowledges sorrow, disappointment, and disorientation as necessary teachers—guiding us toward a compassion that is humble, grounded, and real.

This poem belongs in the Compassionate Poets series because it reframes kindness not as politeness or softness, but as earned wisdom. It reminds us that compassion deepens when we have been broken open by experience, when we recognize how easily everything can be taken away, and when we choose care anyway.

In a world that often urges us to move quickly past grief, “Kindness” honors sorrow as a pathway to empathy and connection.

Attributes of Compassion Highlighted

Kindness rooted in lived experience

Empathy born of loss

Humility and perspective

Care that emerges from awareness

Reflective Questions for Participant Engagement

1. How does this poem change your understanding of kindness?
In what ways does it challenge easier or more superficial definitions?

2. The poem suggests that loss teaches us what matters.
What losses—large or small—have shaped your capacity for compassion?

3. What does it mean to recognize that “everything you love could be lost”?
How does this awareness influence how you treat others today?

4. Where have you encountered kindness that felt deep rather than polite?
What made it different?

5. Creative Invitation:
Write a short reflection or poem beginning with:

“Before I knew kindness…”

“Loss taught me…”

“Kindness begins when…”

Community Invitation

Read this poem slowly. Let it linger. Respond to others with care. Add your own voice to this shared exploration of what kindness truly asks of us.

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Poem of the Day

"Boy Saved From This"

Not every SouthiernSouthern boy with his back held hard by a preacher
to cut out blond higslipping him under a mud-streaked creek
to cut out blond higwishing those waters might just wash away
to cut out blond highis still tight clinging daydreams
to cut out blond higof buck naked men
to cut out blond higflickering like distant flesh fires
to cut out blond higholding beer cans in his mind’s cold night
to cut out blond higmuffled preaching rushing in familiar ambling waves
to cut out blond higagainst his face now flooding by icy baptismal wetness
to cut out blond higand in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost
to cut out blond higwhile his family flings singing voices at wheeling clouds

makes it. SoutheirnBut I did.

And nowSouthern  transparent Sunday mimosa flutes
to cut out blond higflatten the fat of my bottom lip
to cut out blond higa table garnish sprig of friends with degrees
to cut out blond higdill- and rosemary-sewn brunch casseroles

and nowSouh pern everything hovers
to cut out blond higlike cellophane surfaces
to cut out blond higover the grammarless echoes
to cut out blond higof hushed boys who sanctified dancefloors
to cut out blond higtwisting pulsing bodies into Madonna and Britney

but neveriiiiiiiiiiiiiiidanced to Gaga—
to cut out blond higheard their truth on sabbaths
to cut out blond higknew deconstruction or DEI

who neverSoutherneven had the chance
to cut out blond higto cut out blond highlights
to cut out blond higor finally quit smoking.

Boys who are no more.

In the early morning
to cut out blond higwhen time is still wet and wavering to and fro—
to cut out blond higI can remember
to cut out blond higthe hope that glitter brings
to cut out blond higthe light a music
to cut out blond higknocking down church walls
to cut out blond higand I can see
to cut out blond higthem made new and washed clean
to cut out blond higby soundwaves that soften
to cut out blond higon their way across the cosmos.

About the Poet

Willie Edward Taylor Carver Jr. is an American poet whose work confronts the intersections of race, queerness, faith, memory, and survival in the contemporary South. His poetry is formally inventive and emotionally fearless, often braided with repetition, fragmentation, and musical cadence to reflect lived experience shaped by pressure, silence, and resistance.

Carver writes with particular attention to the lives of Black and queer men navigating inherited religious structures, cultural expectation, and the cost of erasure. His work bears witness to those who did not survive such pressures while insisting on remembrance, tenderness, and the possibility of renewal.

Why This Poem

“Boy Saved From This” is a poem of survivor’s compassion.

Carver does not tell a story of triumph untouched by loss. Instead, he situates his survival alongside the names and bodies of boys who “are no more”—those whose queerness, longing, and truth were met with condemnation, silence, or violence. The poem refuses to let survival become a private achievement; it is inseparable from grief, memory, and responsibility.

This poem belongs in the Compassionate Poets series because it shows compassion as remembrance and witness. It honors those who were denied the chance to grow, to change, to dance freely, to breathe outside doctrine. The poem also reclaims sound, music, glitter, and movement as forces of healing—softening what was made rigid, carrying the lost forward “across the cosmos.”

Here, compassion is not pity. It is fidelity to the dead, tenderness toward the living, and an insistence that joy itself can become a form of justice.

Attributes of Compassion Highlighted

Compassion for the dead and the disappeared

Survival with moral memory

Tenderness toward queer becoming

Truth-telling about religious harm

Hope grounded in sound, music, and renewal

Reflective Questions for Participant Engagement

1. What does it mean to survive in a way that remembers those who did not?
How does survival carry responsibility as well as relief?

2. Which images or repetitions stayed with you most strongly?
What do they suggest about pressure, silence, or release?

3. The poem contrasts rigid religious ritual with music, dance, and sound.
Where have you seen joy or creativity act as healing—or resistance?

4. Who are the people or parts of yourself that were never given “the chance”?
How might compassion look toward them now?

5. The poem imagines the lost being “made new and washed clean by soundwaves.”
What helps soften grief for you without erasing it?

6. Creative Invitation:
Write a reflection or poem beginning with:

“I remember the boys who…”

“What saved me was…”

“Music carried us when…”

Community Invitation

This poem asks us to hold grief, gratitude, and responsibility together. Read others’ reflections with care. Respond gently. Let this space honor those who are gone while affirming those still becoming.

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Poem of the Day

"Your Laughter Turns the World to Paradise"

Your laughter turns the world to paradise.
It tears through me like fire.
It teaches me.

Reborn in emptiness,
I emerge laughing,
here to learn from Love
new depths of laughter.

I’ve been short on courage,
but I have a heart of sunlight,
straight from the king’s hand.
I stir up laughter even in those who fear joy.

Crack open my shell. Steal the pearl.
I’ll still be laughing.
It’s the rookies who laugh only when they win.

Last night, the spirit of dawn came to my room
and gave me a lesson in laughter.
Our blazing roars lit the morning sky.

When I brood like a rain cloud,
laughter flashes through me.
It’s the habit of lightning to laugh through a storm.

Look at the furnace. Look at the stones.
See the glowing red veins?
Gold—laughing in fire, daring you,

“Prove you’re no fake!
Laugh even when you lose.”

We’re fodder for death so learn to laugh
from the angel of death.
He laughs at the jeweled belts and crowns of kings—
all that splendor’s just on loan.

Treetop blossoms erupt in laughter.
Petals rain down.

Laugh like the bud of a flower,
hugging the ground.
Its hidden smile opens to a laugh that lasts a lifetime.

From Gold (NYRB Classics, 2022) by Rumi. Translated from the Farsi by Haleh Liza Gafori. Copyright © 2022 by Haleh Liza Gafori. Used with the permission of the translator.

About the Poet

Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī (1207–1273), known simply as Rumi, was a Persian poet, Islamic scholar, and Sufi mystic whose work continues to shape spiritual thought across cultures and centuries. Writing in the context of profound personal loss, devotion, and transformation, Rumi’s poetry explores love as the central force of the universe—capable of dissolving fear, ego, and separation.

For Rumi, love is not sentimental. It is rigorous, disruptive, and refining. His poems invite readers into an intimate relationship with the divine and with one another, where joy, suffering, humility, and laughter all become teachers. Rumi’s enduring influence lies in his insistence that awakening comes not through escape from the world, but through wholehearted participation in it.

Why This Poem

“Your Laughter Turns the World to Paradise” presents joy as a form of spiritual courage. In this poem, laughter is not trivial or naïve—it is forged in fire, shaped by loss, and tested by fear. Rumi teaches that true laughter arises not from winning, power, or certainty, but from surrender to love and acceptance of impermanence. To laugh “even when you lose” is to practice compassion toward oneself and toward the fragile human condition we all share.

This poem belongs in the Compassionate Poets series because it reframes compassion as radical joy—a joy that does not deny suffering but moves through it. Laughter becomes a way of loosening fear, releasing attachment to status or control, and meeting life with humility and openness.

Here, compassion is the willingness to stay soft in a hard world, to laugh amid storms, and to recognize that all splendor is borrowed.

Attributes of Compassion Highlighted

Joy as spiritual resilience

Humility in the face of impermanence

Courage to remain open

Self-compassion and surrender

Love as transformative teacher

Reflective Questions for Participant Engagement

1. What kind of laughter does this poem describe—how is it different from ordinary happiness?
Where have you encountered laughter that felt earned or transformative?

2. Rumi suggests that laughter can move through loss, fear, and fire.
What has tested your ability to remain open or joyful?

3. What does it mean to “laugh even when you lose”?
How might this shift how you relate to failure, grief, or uncertainty?

4. The poem reminds us that power, beauty, and status are “just on loan.”
How does this awareness shape compassion toward yourself or others?

5. Creative Invitation:
Write a reflection or poem beginning with:

“I learned to laugh when…”

“Joy found me in the middle of…”

“Love taught me to…”

Community Invitation

Let this poem loosen what has grown rigid. Read others’ reflections with lightness and care. Add your voice to this shared practice of joy, humility, and love.

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Poem of the Day

"Advice to a Young Prophet"

Keep away, son, these lakes are salt. These flowers

Eat insects. Here private lunatics

Yell and skip in a very dry country.

Or where some haywire monument

Some badfaced daddy of fear

Commands an unintelligent rite.

To dance on the unlucky mountain,

To dance they go, and shake the sin

Out of their feet and hands,

Frenzied until the sudden night

Falls very quiet, and magic sin

Creeps, secret, back again.

Badlands echo with omens of ruin:

Seven are very satisfied, regaining possession:

(Bring a little mescaline, you’ll get along!)

There’s something in your bones,

There’s someone dirty in your critical skin,

There’s a tradition in your cruel misdirected finger

Which you must obey, and scribble in the hot sand:

“Let everybody come and attend

Where lights and airs are fixed

To teach and entertain. O watch the sandy people

Hopping in the naked bull’s-eye,

Shake the wildness out of their limbs,

Try to make peace like John in skins

Elijah in the timid air

or Anthony in tombs:

Pluck the imaginary trigger, brothers.

Shoot the devil: he’ll be back again!”

America needs these fatal friends

Of God and country, to grovel in mystical ashes,

Pretty big prophets whose words don’t burn,

Fighting the strenuous imago all day long.

Only these lunatics, (O happy chance)

Only these are sent. Only this anaemic thunder

Grumbles on the salt flats, in rainless night:

O go home, brother, go home!

The devil’s back again,

And magic Hell is swallowing flies.

Copyright Credit: Thomas Merton, “Advice to a Young Prophet” from The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton. Copyright © 1963 by The Abbey of Gethsemani, Inc. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.

About the Poet

Thomas Merton (1915–1968) was a Trappist monk, poet, essayist, and spiritual teacher whose work bridged contemplation and public conscience. Living most of his adult life at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, Merton wrote extensively on prayer, humility, nonviolence, racial justice, and the dangers of nationalism and ideological certainty.

Though rooted in Christian monastic tradition, Merton was deeply engaged with Buddhism, Sufism, Judaism, and Hinduism, believing that authentic spirituality must lead to compassion, self-critique, and responsibility in the world. His poetry often carries a prophetic edge—skeptical of false righteousness and alert to the ways religion and power can collude to do harm.

Why This Poem

“Advice to a Young Prophet” is a poem about false prophecy—and the cost of confusing certainty with truth.

Merton writes with biting irony about spectacles of righteousness that promise purification but reproduce violence, fear, and control. He warns against religious performance that mistakes frenzy for transformation and against prophets whose words do not burn—who speak loudly without moral depth or humility.

This poem belongs in the Compassionate Poets series because it frames compassion as discernment. Merton insists that genuine compassion requires resisting manipulative spiritual theatrics, ideological intoxication, and the seductions of power wrapped in sacred language. True prophecy, he suggests, is not about dominating others or exorcising imagined enemies, but about confronting the “devil” within—again and again.

At a time when religion and politics are often entangled in ways that dehumanize, this poem calls us back to inner responsibility, humility, and the hard work of honest self-examination.

Attributes of Compassion Highlighted

Moral discernment

Humility over spectacle

Resistance to ideological fanaticism

Truth-telling without self-righteousness

Inner accountability

Reflective Questions

1. How does this poem distinguish between true spiritual insight and performance or spectacle?
Where do you see that distinction blurred today?

2. What does Merton suggest about the dangers of certainty—especially religious or moral certainty?
How can conviction coexist with humility?

3. The poem warns that “the devil’s back again.”
How do you understand this line—as a spiritual metaphor, a psychological truth, or a social warning?

4. What does compassionate prophecy look like in your own context?
How might truth be spoken without domination or contempt?

5. Creative Invitation:
Write a reflection or poem beginning with:

“The words that do not burn…”

“What I must unlearn to speak truth…”

“The quiet work of compassion is…”

Community Invitation

This poem asks us to question what we follow and why. Read others’ reflections with openness. Respond without certainty. Let this space hold thoughtful critique as an expression of care.

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Poem of the Day

"Be Cheerful"

Chicago Daily Tribune June 25th, 1911

When you’re feeling sad and depressed

And from worries you are distressed,

Do not cry

But just try

To be cheerful.

When you cannot have your way

And your sister will not play,

Do not fret,

Do not fume,

Let the expression you assume

Be cheerful.

About the Poet

Dorothy Day (1897–1980) was an American journalist, social activist, and co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement. She dedicated her life to nonviolence, voluntary poverty, hospitality for the poor, and unwavering resistance to injustice. Though best known for her radical adult commitments to peace and compassion, Day began writing poetry as a young girl—already attentive to the emotional lives of ordinary people and the moral weight of everyday choices.

This early poem, published when she was just fourteen, offers a glimpse of a lifelong ethic that would later mature into courageous acts of solidarity with workers, immigrants, the unhoused, and those harmed by war and inequality.

Why This Poem

At first glance, this poem appears simple—even quaint. Yet its power lies precisely in that simplicity. Written by a teenager, Be Cheerful reflects an early intuition that compassion is not only found in grand gestures, but in how we respond to frustration, disappointment, and everyday conflict.

In a world marked by hardship, Dorothy Day would later learn—and teach—that cheerfulness is not denial of suffering but a moral discipline: a refusal to let resentment, despair, or ego govern one’s response to others. This poem quietly introduces a core truth of compassionate living: how we carry ourselves affects the emotional weather around us.

The poem reminds us that compassion often begins as a choice—made repeatedly, imperfectly, and in small moments.

Attributes of compassion highlighted:

Emotional resilience

Gentleness in conflict

Choosing generosity over grievance

Inner discipline as a form of care for others

Reflective Questions

1. How does this poem challenge or affirm your understanding of what “being cheerful” really means?

2. Can cheerfulness be an act of compassion, even in difficult or unjust circumstances? When might it be difficult?

3. What small, everyday moments test your ability to respond with patience rather than frustration?

4. How do your emotional responses—visible or invisible—affect those around you?

5. What might it look like to practice cheerfulness not as forced positivity, but as a conscious choice rooted in care?

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Poem of the Day

"Somehow We Survive"

Somehow we survive

and tendernesss, frustrated, does

not wither.

Investigating searchlights rake

our naked, unprotected contours;

over our heads the monolithic

decalogue

of fascist prohibition glowers

and teeters for a catastrophic

fall;

boots club the peeling door.

But shomehow we survive

severance, deprivation, loss.

Patrols uncoil along the asphalt

dark

hissing their menace to our lies,

most cruel, all our land is

scarred with terror,

rendered unlovely and unlovable;

surrendered are we and all our

passionate surrender

but somehow tenderness survives.

About the Poet

Dennis Brutus (1924–2009) was a South African poet, educator, and anti-apartheid activist whose life and work were inseparable from the struggle for justice.

Born in what is now Zimbabwe and raised in South Africa, Brutus became internationally known for opposing apartheid through both political organizing and poetry. He was imprisoned on Robben Island alongside Nelson Mandela, later living in exile after being banned by the apartheid regime.

Brutus’s poetry bears witness to state violence, surveillance, exile, and dispossession—but it is equally known for its fierce moral clarity and insistence on human tenderness as an act of resistance. He believed poetry must speak truth under pressure, and that compassion itself could survive even the most brutal systems.

Why This Poem

Somehow We Survive is a quiet but defiant declaration of moral endurance. Written under the shadow of apartheid’s surveillance, raids, and terror, the poem refuses to surrender the possibility of human tenderness—even when everything conspires to extinguish it.

This poem belongs in the Compassionate Poets series because it defines compassion not as sentiment, but as persistence. Brutus names fear, deprivation, and violence without softening them, yet returns—again and again—to the survival of tenderness. In doing so, he affirms compassion as a form of resistance, an ethical stance that endures when love is most endangered.

The poem reminds us that compassion does not require safety or victory; it requires fidelity to our shared humanity.

Reflective Questions

1. What does “tenderness” mean in this poem?
How does Brutus redefine tenderness in a context of surveillance, threat, and fear?

2. Where do you see compassion surviving today under conditions of pressure or injustice?
What parallels can you draw between the poem’s setting and our current world?

3. The poem repeats the phrase “somehow we survive.”
What gives that survival meaning beyond mere endurance?

4. How does witnessing—naming fear, naming violence—become an act of compassion in this poem?

5. What forms of tenderness are you called to protect or practice when circumstances feel overwhelming or unjust?

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Poem of the Day

"The Little Mute Boy"

The little boy was looking for his voice.
(The king of the crickets had it.)
In a drop of water
the little boy was looking for his voice.

I do not want it for speaking with;
I will make a ring of it
so that he may wear my silence
on his little finger

In a drop of water
the little boy was looking for his voice.

(The captive voice, far away,
put on a cricket's clothes.)

From The Selected Poems of Federico García Lorca, by Federico García Lorca, translated by W.S. Merwin, published by New Directions. Copyright © 1955 by W.S. Merwin. Reprinted by permission of W.S. Merwin.

About the Poet

Federico García Lorca was one of the most influential poets and playwrights of 20th-century Spain and a central figure of the Generation of ’27. Deeply rooted in Andalusian culture, Lorca’s work draws on folk traditions, music, surreal imagery, and myth to explore themes of love, longing, injustice, silence, and death.

A gifted artist across forms—poetry, drama, music, and drawing—Lorca was also a public intellectual who believed art should give voice to those rendered invisible. As a gay man living in a repressive political climate, he understood personally the dangers of silencing and marginalization. In 1936, at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, Lorca was executed by fascist forces, making him a lasting symbol of artistic courage and moral witness.

Why This Poem

“The Little Mute Boy” is a tender, haunting meditation on voice, silence, and dignity. Rather than framing muteness as a deficiency, Lorca reimagines silence as something precious—something that can be held, protected, even worn like a ring.

The poem reflects a deeply compassionate stance: it does not force speech, explanation, or performance. Instead, it honors interiority, listening, and the right to remain unspoken. In a world that often equates worth with volume and visibility, Lorca insists that silence itself can be meaningful, sacred, and expressive.

Within the context of this series, the poem highlights compassion as:

Respect for those who cannot—or choose not to—speak

Protection of vulnerability rather than exposure

Listening as an ethical act

Valuing inner truth over public articulation

It is a poem about bearing witness without domination, a core dimension of compassionate presence.

Reflective Questions

1. Voice and Silence

Where in your life do you feel pressure to speak when silence might be more truthful—or safer?

How does this poem challenge the idea that speaking is always the highest good?

2. Compassionate Listening

Who in your community may be “looking for their voice” in ways that are not verbal?

How might compassion look like listening without demanding explanation?

3. Protection vs. Exposure

Lorca refuses to use the boy’s voice for speech. Why might protection be an act of compassion?

When does advocacy become intrusion?

4. Inner Worth

What parts of yourself feel most alive but least spoken?

How might you honor those silent dimensions—your own and others’?

5. Silence as Resistance

In times of political or cultural repression, how can silence itself become a form of dignity or resistance?

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Poem of the Day

"We Lived Happily During the War"

And when they bombed other people’s houses, we

protested
but not enough, we opposed them but not

enough. I was
in my bed, around my bed America

was falling: invisible house by invisible house by invisible house.

I took a chair outside and watched the sun.

In the sixth month
of a disastrous reign in the house of money

in the street of money in the city of money in the country of money,
our great country of money, we (forgive us)

lived happily during the war.

From Deaf Republic. Copyright © 2019 by Ilya Kaminsky. Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of Graywolf Press.

About the Poet

Ilya Kaminsky is a Ukrainian-American poet, critic, and translator, born in Odesa (then part of the Soviet Union) in 1977. Deaf since childhood, Kaminsky emigrated to the United States as a teenager after his family received asylum. His work explores war, moral responsibility, silence, exile, and the consequences of inaction.

Kaminsky is the author of Deaf Republic, a groundbreaking poetic work responding to state violence and collective complicity, and Dancing in Odessa. He has received numerous honors, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Lannan Foundation, and his poetry is widely taught for its ethical urgency and lyrical power.

Why This Poem

“We Lived Happily During the War” is a devastating meditation on complicity, comfort, and moral distance. Rather than describing violence directly, Kaminsky turns the lens inward, asking how ordinary lives continue amid atrocity—and at what cost.

The poem challenges readers to confront an uncomfortable truth: that suffering often persists not only because of cruelty, but because of silence, distraction, and the privilege of not noticing.

In a series dedicated to compassion, this poem is essential because it insists that compassion is not passive empathy—it is moral awareness. Kaminsky reminds us that to live “happily” while others suffer is itself a political and ethical condition that demands reckoning.

Attributes of compassion highlighted:

Moral responsibility

Awareness beyond borders

Courage to witness

Accountability for silence

Reflective Questions

1. The poem repeatedly uses the word “happily.”
What does that word mean in the context of suffering elsewhere?

2. Where in your own life might comfort or routine have dulled awareness of injustice?

3. What responsibilities do individuals have when violence is happening “far away”?

4. How does silence function in the poem—as protection, denial, or harm?

5. What might compassionate action look like when we realize we have been “living happily during the war”?

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Poem of the Day

"forgetting urdu"

forgetting urdu

the forgetting began in 1858 and long before and everyday since the Redcoats
with their bayonets and bleach began scouring my motherland raw.
imperial lather to cleanse the savage. their slogan: Become us but you will never be us.
rinse and repeat. rinse and repeat. rid and repeat. how do i write rebellion
when i can no longer read it? the barbed wire of Angrezi wound around my tongue
bleeds words that are not my own. there is amnesia in my fingers as they trace
my ancestor’s verses right to left, alephs and ink tides i can no longer bend
myself into. the parchment will not hold me, tearing when i try to wear its poetry,
rubbing the browning pages against my skin, trying to darken my mouth with
the ink. i swim in these white pages, not cleansed enough, never cleansed enough.
grasping for colour to hold on to, my tongue falters for words to anchor me,
a washed-out-wreck set adrift without a flag or a call, this cry struggles for sound.
ghalib: forgive me, the bows and masts of nastaleeq i have forgotten how to write in.
i will write a ghazal when اُردُو returns, carries me home and colours me in.

By Zehra Naqvi. Published in Issue 40.2, “Our Rubble Our Loss”, Room, 2017

About the Poet

Zehra Naqvi is a Pakistani Canadian poet, editor, and educator whose work explores belonging, faith, migration, gender, and the interior lives of young people coming into consciousness. She is the author of The Knot of My Tongue (2024), which has been widely recognized for its lyrical tenderness and emotional clarity, earning shortlists for major Canadian poetry awards.

Naqvi’s poetry is notable for its gentleness without naïveté. She writes with an intimate, invitational voice—often addressing the reader directly—creating poems that feel like conversations held at thresholds: between childhood and adulthood, belief and doubt, solitude and connection. Her work offers reassurance without erasing complexity, making space for vulnerability as a form of strength.

Why This Poem

“Forgetting Urdu” explores compassion through the lens of language loss, migration, and inherited tenderness. Rather than treating forgetting as failure, the poem holds it as a quiet grief—one shaped by love, distance, and the pressures of survival in a new world.

This poem is deeply compassionate because it refuses blame. It recognizes how languages disappear not through neglect alone, but through assimilation, protection, and the ache of wanting to belong. The poem honors what remains even when words are lost: memory carried in the body, affection embedded in gesture, and the emotional residue of a mother tongue that still lives beneath English speech.

In this context, compassion becomes an act of remembering without punishment—allowing ourselves and others to grieve what has been lost while honoring the courage it took to cross worlds. The poem invites us to see forgetting not as betrayal, but as part of a larger human story of movement, adaptation, and love stretched across generations.

Reflective Questions

1. What languages—spoken or unspoken—have shaped your life?
Are there words, dialects, or ways of speaking that you feel yourself drifting away from?

2. What does “forgetting” mean in your own story?
Is there something you have let go of in order to survive, belong, or move forward?

3. How does the poem reframe loss with tenderness rather than shame?
Where in your life might this reframing offer relief or self-compassion?

4. What remains when language fades?
How do memory, love, or identity persist beyond words?

5. How might compassion look like honoring both what was kept and what was lost?
For yourself, your family, or your community?

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Poem of the Day

"How to Bring Your Children to America"

The mothers became targets.

Hanging on clotheslines, bibs

of the barely fed.

Children, countries born

split in two—firstborns

whose first steps aborted

their sisters, brothers, the fresh bread

of their love language,

children the English

tearing sphincters in two.

The mothers came by boat,

with wings, forgetting

their own mothers' uteruses, singing

praises to Allah, they came over and over again

until it could not matter that so-and-so had died,

we were the nicknames escaping

their bellies, the translation between

stay and never arrived.

Husbands, uncles, we were

wives, illnesses, pawpaw seeds,

only things that could save them,

sickle cells that knew better

than to touch. Visible

only in their dialect, they sent for cousins,

wired money, forgave ancestors

we couldn't trust.

They stopped speaking to us

in our birth language until we became new

dictionaries, became the consonants

of the Constitution they studied,

our first words forgotten

artifacts in our home

countries. They were the ones

whose fathers had died

in the milt of language,

without daughters.

In America, we were memories

without accents or consensus,

lambs that couldn't be traded

for milk, meal, or honey,

the fact of our bodies

in America their new Quran.

And, oh, how they moaned,

how they starved, sucking their teeth

between King's English, yelling for us

to stop playing immigrant and go

get naturalized.

Copyright Credit: Hafizah Geter, "How to Bring Your Children to America" from Un-American.  Copyright © 2020 by Hafizah Geter.  Reprinted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.

About the Poet

Hafizah Geter is an American poet, essayist, and performance artist whose work explores Black identity, immigration, language, faith, and the embodied experience of displacement. She is the author of Un-American (Wesleyan University Press), a collection that interrogates belonging, citizenship, and inherited trauma through lyric intensity and political clarity.

Getter’s poetry is known for its visceral imagery, linguistic innovation, and moral urgency. Drawing on African American, Muslim, and immigrant histories, she writes poems that confront systems of violence while centering the lived experiences—especially of women and children—often erased from dominant narratives.

Why This Poem

“How to Bring Your Children to America” is a devastatingly compassionate poem because it refuses abstraction. It tells the story of immigration not as policy or aspiration, but as bodily sacrifice, maternal courage, linguistic rupture, and generational cost.

This poem centers mothers as moral agents and targets—women who carried children across borders while losing language, lineage, and parts of themselves. Compassion here is not sentimental; it is fierce, painful, and unfinished. Geter shows how love becomes strategy, how children become “dictionaries,” how survival demands forgetting even as memory aches to remain.

The poem belongs in this series because it insists that compassion must reckon with who pays the price of belonging. It challenges readers to see immigration not as arrival, but as continual translation—between languages, bodies, laws, and losses. In doing so, it calls forth a deeper compassion: one that honors sacrifice without romanticizing it, and witnesses survival without demanding gratitude.

Attributes of compassion highlighted:

Witnessing without erasure

Honoring maternal sacrifice

Compassion under structural violence

Language as survival and loss

Intergenerational responsibility

Reflective Questions

1. Whose labor and sacrifice are hidden in stories of “arrival”?
How does the poem change the way you understand immigration or belonging?

2. What does it mean to become a “new dictionary”?
Have you ever been asked—explicitly or implicitly—to translate between worlds, cultures, or identities?

3. How does language function as both protection and loss in this poem?
What is gained when a birth language is set aside—and what is mourned?

4. The poem centers mothers as both saviors and targets.
How does this complicate common narratives of strength, resilience, or motherhood?

5. What might compassionate response look like—not pity, but accountability?
How can communities, institutions, or individuals honor these sacrifices without exploiting them?

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Poem of the Day

"Requiem" (an excerpt)

No foreign sky protected me,
no stranger's wing shielded my face.
I stand as witness to the common lot,
survivor of that time, that place.

Instead of a Preface

In the terrible years of the Yezhov terror I spent seventeen months waiting in line
outside the prison in Leningrad. One day somebody in the crowd identified me. Standing
behind me was a woman, with lips blue from the cold, who had, of course, never heard
me called by name before. Now she started out of the torpor common to us all and asked
me in a whisper (everyone whispered there):
"Can you describe this?"
And I said: "I can."
Then something like a smile passed fleetingly over what had once been her face.

Dedication

Such grief might make the mountains stoop,
reverse the waters where they flow,
but cannot burst these ponderous bolts
that block us from the prison cells
crowded with mortal woe. . . .
For some the wind can freshly blow,
for some the sunlight fade at ease,
but we, made partners in our dread,
hear but the grating of the keys,
and heavy-booted soldiers' tread.
As if for early mass, we rose
and each day walked the wilderness,
trudging through silent street and square,
to congregate, less live than dead.
The sun declined, the Neva blurred,
and hope sang always from afar.
Whose sentence is decreed? . . . That moan,
that sudden spurt of woman's tears,
shows one distinguished from the rest,
as if they'd knocked her to the ground
and wrenched the heart out of her breast,
then let her go, reeling, alone.
Where are they now, my nameless friends
from those two years I spent in hell?
What specters mock them now, amid
the fury of Siberian snows,
or in the blighted circle of the moon?
To them I cry, Hail and Farewell!

Prologue

That was a time when only the dead
could smile, delivered from their wars,
and the sign, the soul, of Leningrad
dangled outside its prison-house;
and the regiments of the condemned,
herded in the railroad-yards,
shrank from the engine's whistle-song
whose burden went, "Away, pariahs!"
The stars of death stood over us.
And Russia, guiltless, beloved, writhed
under the crunch of bloodstained boots,
under the wheels of Black Marias.

Summary of the Excerpt

This excerpt from Requiem weaves personal memory with collective grief during the years of the Yezhov terror in Leningrad. Akhmatova places herself not above suffering, but within it—standing in line, whispering, freezing, waiting alongside other women whose lives have been hollowed by state violence.

The work moves between prose and poetry, private moment and public catastrophe. It names fear without hysteria, grief without sentimentality, and courage without triumph. The women in the poem are bound together by waiting, loss, and an unspoken understanding that survival itself has become a moral burden.

Rather than dramatizing horror, Requiem records it—quietly, relentlessly—insisting that remembrance is a form of resistance.

About the Poet

Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966) is one of the most important poets of the twentieth century and a central voice of Russian literature. Writing through revolution, civil war, Stalinist terror, World War II, and its aftermath, she became a poet of moral endurance and historical witness.

During the years of Stalin’s Great Terror, Akhmatova’s son was imprisoned, and her work was banned. Requiem was composed between 1935 and 1940, memorized by friends, and never written down in full at the time for fear of arrest. It circulated orally for decades and was not published in Russia until many years after Stalin’s death.

Akhmatova did not write Requiem as private lament alone, but as collective testimony—speaking with and for the countless women who stood in prison lines, waiting for news of their loved ones. She understood poetry as an ethical act: to remember, to witness, and to refuse silence.

Why This Poem

Requiem is one of the most powerful expressions of compassion as witness ever written.

This poem belongs in the series because it defines compassion not as comfort, but as staying present to unbearable truth. Akhmatova refuses escape—no “foreign sky,” no “stranger’s wing.” Instead, she stands in place, lending her voice to those who could not speak without risking death.

The moment in which a woman asks, “Can you describe this?” and Akhmatova replies, “I can,” becomes the moral center of the poem—and of this entire series. Compassion here is the courage to remember accurately, to testify faithfully, and to carry grief that does not belong to one person alone.

Requiem reminds us that poetry can be a shelter—not from suffering, but within it—and that bearing witness is itself an act of love.

Attributes of compassion highlighted:

Witness without distance

Solidarity in suffering

Moral courage

Collective memory

Truth-telling under terror

Reflective Questions

1. What does it mean to stand as a witness rather than a victim or hero?
How does Akhmatova position herself among the women in the prison lines?

2. Why is the question “Can you describe this?” so central?
What responsibility does naming suffering place on the poet—or on us as readers?

3. How does silence function in this poem?
When is silence protective, and when does it become complicit?

4. What forms of suffering today remain unspoken or whispered?
Who is waiting in lines now—literal or metaphorical—for justice, news, or recognition?

5. How might remembering be an act of compassion?
What stories do you feel called to hold, honor, or pass on?

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Poem of Day

"Blood That Became a Seed"

Your voice in Usultán, where ceiba trees open

green umbrellas above the cross-staked graves;

in Chalatenango, lush with mango trees and bones;

in Morazán, where graveyards have a voice—yours:

If I am killed, let my blood be a seed of freedom for this suffering people.

Blood and seed to break rock: tattooed prisoners

with hearts so far from grace—

their muscled backs, a bloom of black crosses

and daggers, their spirits lost and hungry. Your blood, Oscar, for fleeing mothers

lugging children through bush and river muck,

vigilant for the coiled and savaged.

Your blood for campesinos who walk

into a desert furnace. Your blood for girls

cut down, wildflowers left in fields.

Now people light candles and still sing as if las maras, la policía, el presidente might hear the words, might turn blood

into seed, wine, a garden

About the Poet

Renny Golden is an American poet, writer, and longtime human rights activist whose work bears witness to political violence, displacement, and the resilience of communities living under oppression. Her poetry is deeply shaped by years of solidarity work in Central America, particularly El Salvador, where she documented atrocities and accompanied communities during and after the civil war.

Golden’s writing refuses abstraction. It is rooted in place, history, and named lives. Through poetry, she honors martyrs, survivors, and those whose suffering is often erased from public memory. Her work insists that compassion must include truth-telling—and that remembering is itself a moral act.

Why This Poem?

“Blood That Became a Seed” is a poem of remembrance, grief, and fierce moral clarity.

This poem belongs in a series on compassion because it confronts violence without turning away—and still insists on hope. Golden draws on the words attributed to Archbishop Óscar Romero, assassinated in El Salvador for speaking out against injustice: “If I am killed, let my blood be a seed of freedom for this suffering people.”

Rather than romanticizing sacrifice, the poem holds the full weight of loss: mass graves, fleeing mothers, murdered girls, tattooed prisoners, and communities caught between gangs, police, and political power. Compassion here is not comfort—it is solidarity. It is the refusal to forget names, places, and histories that still shape the present.

By ending with candles, song, and the fragile hope that blood might yet become seed, Golden reminds us that compassion persists even where violence seems endless. It lives in memory, in resistance, and in the human insistence on dignity.

Reflection Questions

Take time with this poem. It carries many voices.

Bearing Witness

What images or lines feel most difficult to hold—and why?

How does the poem ask us to witness suffering without turning away?

Compassion & Transformation

What does it mean to imagine blood becoming seed?

Where have you seen pain transformed into care, resistance, or renewal?

Memory & Responsibility

Why is remembering specific places and people an act of compassion?

Whose suffering today risks being forgotten or normalized?

Creative Invitation

Write a short response beginning with:
“What we refuse to forget…”

Or reflect on a place, person, or story that you feel called to hold in memory.

Closing Invitation

Compassion sometimes takes the form of grief carried carefully. Sometimes it is memory held like a candle. Sometimes it is the courage to believe that even now, blood might become seed.

You are invited to respond in whatever way feels right—reflection, poetry, image, or quiet presence. This space honors all forms of attentive witnessing.

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Poem of the Day

75 ["Wake, butterfly"]

Translated By Lucien Stryk

Wake, butterfly—

it's late, we've miles

to go together.

About the Poet

Matsuo Bashō (1644–1694) is widely regarded as the greatest master of haiku, the concise Japanese poetic form that captures a fleeting moment of awareness. Living during Japan’s Edo period, Bashō was not only a poet but also a wanderer, teacher, and spiritual seeker. Much of his poetry emerged from long journeys on foot, during which he observed landscapes, seasons, and ordinary life with radical attentiveness.

Bashō transformed haiku from a clever literary exercise into a profound spiritual and ethical practice. His poems invite readers into deep presence—where compassion arises not from explanation or argument, but from seeing clearly and gently. For Bashō, poetry was a way of living lightly on the earth and in respectful relationship with all beings.

Why This Poem?

“Wake, butterfly— / it’s late, we’ve miles / to go together.” is a poem of extraordinary tenderness and shared responsibility.

In just seventeen syllables, Bashō collapses the distance between human and non-human life. The speaker does not command or rush the butterfly; instead, he acknowledges companionship and shared journey. Compassion here is relational—rooted in mutual movement, care, and time.

This poem belongs in a series on compassion because it reminds us that:

no one travels alone,

even the smallest, most fragile life is a companion,

and urgency can be held with gentleness.

In a world that often equates urgency with force, Bashō offers another way: walking together, awake, attentive, and kind.

Reflection Questions

Pause. Read the poem again—slowly.

Inner Reflection

What feelings arise when you imagine speaking to a butterfly as a companion?

Where in your life do you sense both urgency and tenderness at the same time?

Shared Journey

Who or what are you “walking with” right now—human or more-than-human?

How does this poem change the way you think about responsibility toward others?

Compassion Beyond the Human

What might it mean to practice compassion toward non-human life—animals, plants, landscapes?

How does attentiveness itself become a form of care?

Creative Invitation

Write your own three-line poem beginning with:
“Wake, ___ —”

Or reflect on a moment when you felt quietly accompanied on a difficult or meaningful journey.

Closing Invitation

Compassion does not always speak loudly.
Sometimes it whispers: we still have miles to go—together.

You are welcome to respond with words, images, sound, or silence held with intention. This space honors all forms of mindful presence.

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Railcar (*the last day of Aaron Bushnell)

I watched a man set himself on fire today. It was a Sunday On Sundays, I like to take the train from Indian Creek to Hamilton Holmes Collier Heights used to be my home, So on the Blue Line, I take the time to sit and write poems Looking at people as they enter and exit the railcar The young woman with a purse, Telfar Followed by the Bag Lady, she hobbles onboard, imbalanced as justice’s scales are And I cannot help but wonder about the man who set himself ablaze About what makes him say, ‘I cannot live another day in a world this cruel. In a world where 14,000 Gazan children should be in school. But instead, they have been removed from the face of the earth. All because of the open-air prison where their mothers happened to have given birth.’

I watched a man set himself on fire today, and I had questions Uncomfortable ones like, “What took so long?” The police saw the self-immolation taking place and approached with their weapons drawn. And I can think of no better metaphor for this moment than when the officer shouted at the other “I don’t need guns. I need a fire extinguisher!” We’ve just passed Ashby, where the old man in black church socks lingers And I keep thinking about what it means when a protest is deemed ‘too extreme.’ Where you would rather be gasoline-lit than complicit Where the world is moving in such a way that you no longer feel as though you fit.

They say it is a tragedy, and I do not disagree. That it is no measure of good health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.

I watched a man set himself on fire today, fully dressed in Air Force fatigues I’m thinking, what has this man seen that made him realize he no longer believes he is a killer? A weapon of mass destruction We’re now at Five Points station, and I can’t hear the conductor’s muffled instructions And I don’t know if you know that MARTA has partnered with the Georgia Department of Natural Resources To drop two decommissioned railcars in the ocean To combat coral reef erosion, With time, these railcars will transform into essential fish habitats And I find something in that so...beautiful That a stable home can be made out of something that was once movable That a transportation mode can now become an abode That something seemingly out of place can restore faith, balance and health That much like the man on fire, perhaps going off the rails might mean you might become a home for someone else. If no one’s ever told you, consider this permission to become a new thing. Take the new information you learn and emerge out of that cocoon with wings They have tried unsuccessfully to stifle your song of reinvention, so from here on, Let us sing Let us sing Let us sing...

Bring on the transformation The repurposing. A baptism by fire or water can be purging

It’s a Sunday, after all...

But then again, What do I know? I’m just a poet with a Breeze card.... in a railcar.... with a notebook full of poems.

Poem used with permission of the author.

About the Poet

Adán Bean is an accomplished multihyphenate — an Emmy-nominated spoken-word poet, emcee, writer, host, storyteller, and creative director who hails from Ohio but has called Atlanta home for over 20 years. Adán was awarded the 2023 Arts & Social Justice Fellowship for Emory University, where he served as a teaching artist at Oxford College. After bringing his talents to the Kennedy Center in 2020, Adán was awarded the Serenbe Frances Focus Fellowship from the South Fulton Institute. Adán Bean filmed a Tiny Desk concert performance and directed the short documentary “Curb Appeal,” which tackles the issues of housing insecurity and home inequity.

Reflective Questions

You may wish to sit with one or two of these, rather than all at once.

Witness and Response

What emotions arise as you move through this poem? Where do you feel them in your body?

What does it mean to “witness” something difficult — and how do we respond without turning away?

Uncomfortable Questions

The poem asks: “What took so long?”
What do you think the poet is questioning here?

Are there realities in our world that we have become “adjusted” to? What might it mean to resist that adjustment?

Compassion and Action

What is the difference between feeling compassion and acting on it?

When does compassion require us to speak, to question, or to change something in our own lives?

Transformation and Repurposing

The poem offers the image of railcars becoming ocean habitats. What does this metaphor suggest to you?

Have you experienced a moment when something broken, painful, or out of place became something meaningful or life-giving?

Personal Reflection

What might it mean, in your own life, to “become a new thing”?

Is there something you are being invited to let go of, or to transform?

Voice and Expression

If you were to respond to this poem with your own words — what would you say?

What line would you carry with you, and why?

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Poem of the Day

"Ah, Ah"

for Lurline McGregor

Ah, ah cries the crow arching toward the heavy sky over the marina.

Lands on the crown of the palm tree.

Ah, ah slaps the urgent cove of ocean swimming through the slips.

We carry canoes to the edge of the salt.

Ah, ah groans the crew with the weight, the winds cutting skin.

We claim our seats. Pelicans perch in the draft for fish.

Ah, ah beats our lungs and we are racing into the waves.

Though there are worlds below us and above us, we are straight ahead.

Ah, ah tattoos the engines of your plane against the sky—away from these waters.

Each paddle stroke follows the curve from reach to loss.

Ah, ah calls the sun from a fishing boat with a pale, yellow sail. We fly by

on our return, over the net of eternity thrown out for stars.

Ah, ah scrapes the hull of my soul. Ah, ah.

Copyright Credit: "Ah, Ah" from How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems:1975-2001 by Joy Harjo. Copyright © 2002 by Joy Harjo. Used by permission of W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., www.wwnorton.com.

About the Poet

Joy Harjo is a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, an internationally acclaimed poet, musician, memoirist, and the first Native American Poet Laureate of the United States. Her work is rooted in Indigenous ways of knowing that understand the world as animate, interconnected, and alive with story, sound, and spirit.

Across her poetry, Harjo weaves land, history, music, and memory into a living cosmology where humans are not separate from nature but move within it. Her writing insists that healing—personal and collective—comes through listening: to ancestors, to the earth, to the body, and to the rhythms that hold us together. Compassion in Harjo’s work is not abstract empathy; it is relationship, responsibility, and motion.

Why This Poem

“Ah, Ah” belongs in a series on compassion because it is a poem of shared breath, shared labor, and shared direction.

The repeated call—Ah, ah—moves through crow, ocean, body, engine, sun, and soul. It becomes a chant of exertion and presence, marking moments when effort, beauty, loss, and return are inseparable. Compassion here is kinesthetic: it lives in muscles straining together, in lungs burning, in paddles cutting water, in the ache of departure and the grace of return.

This poem reminds us that compassion is not only how we feel for one another—it is how we move together through uncertainty, staying “straight ahead” even as worlds exist above and below us. It honors the dignity of collective effort and the sacredness of journey itself.

Reflection Questions

Read the poem again, listening for its rhythm.

Breath & Body

How does the repetition of “Ah, ah” feel in your body as you read?

Where do you notice breath, effort, or exertion in your own life right now?

Interconnection

What does the poem reveal about the relationship between humans, land, water, and sky?

How does this poem expand your understanding of compassion beyond words or feelings?

Direction & Loss

What does it mean to keep moving “straight ahead” even when there is loss?

Where are you navigating a journey that requires shared effort or trust?

Creative Invitation

Write a short response beginning with:
“Ah, ah…”
letting the sound guide the meaning.

Or reflect on a moment when shared work—physical or emotional—created connection.

Closing Invitation

Compassion is sometimes a chant,
sometimes a paddle stroke,
sometimes the breath we share
as we move forward together.

You are invited to respond with words, sound, movement, image, or quiet listening. All are welcome here.

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Poem of the Day

"Clouds"

A whip-poor-will brushed

her wing along the ground

a moment ago, fifty years

in the orchard where my father

kept pear and plum,

a decade of peach trees

and Antinovka’s apples

whose seeds come

from Russia by ship

under clouds islanding

a window very past

where also went

the soul of my mother

in a boat with blossoming

sails like apple petals

in wind fifty years at once.

Copyright Credit: Poem copyright ©2020 by Carolyn Forché, “Clouds” from In the Lateness of the World, (Penguin Publishing Group, 2020.) Poem reprinted by permission of the author and the publisher.

About the Poet

Carolyn Forché is one of the most influential voices in contemporary poetry concerned with conscience, memory, and moral witness. Her work stands at the intersection of lyric beauty and historical responsibility, shaped by her experiences in zones of conflict, particularly during the civil war in El Salvador, and by her lifelong commitment to human rights.

Often described as a poet of the witness, Forché resists poetry that turns away from the world’s suffering. Instead, she insists that language can hold grief, accountability, and love at the same time. Her poems do not shout; they listen. They gather fragments of history, family, exile, and loss, asking readers to stay present with what is fragile and unresolved.

Her later work, including In the Lateness of the World, reflects a deepening attentiveness to time—how personal memory and collective history overlap, how loss accumulates quietly, and how the natural world carries human stories forward.

Why This Poem

“Clouds” is a poem of inheritance—of land, memory, migration, and love that persists across decades. Unlike poems of protest that confront us with urgency, this poem invites us into a slower compassion: one rooted in remembrance.

Here, Forché weaves together the ordinary and the transcendent—orchards, apple seeds, birds, parents, ships, and clouds. The poem holds fifty years all at once, suggesting that time is not linear but layered. Loss does not disappear; it drifts, returns, and reshapes us.

This poem was chosen to close the series because it models a mature compassion—one that does not demand resolution, but honors continuity. It reminds us that compassion is not only action or resistance; it is also attention. To family histories. To migration. To what has been carried across oceans. To what remains unfinished.

In “Clouds,” compassion is quiet, durable, and intimate. It is the act of remembering without possession, of loving without certainty.

Reflective Questions

These questions are designed to encourage stillness, memory, and shared reflection—inviting participants to respond with words, images, or silence.

1. What memories in this poem feel personal to you, even if they are not your own? Why do you think they resonate?

2. The poem collapses time—fifty years happening “at once.” Where in your own life do past and present overlap most strongly?

3. Seeds, ships, clouds, and orchards appear throughout the poem. What symbols of continuity or inheritance exist in your own story?

4. How does this poem expand your understanding of compassion beyond urgency or action, toward remembrance and care?

5. What does it mean to carry love forward without needing closure or answers?

6. If compassion were a landscape in your life, what would it look like? What would be growing there?

Invitation to Participants

You are invited to respond by:

Sharing a memory that surfaced while reading

Posting a short poem or reflection about inheritance or time

Uploading an image or recording that represents continuity or remembrance

Offering a word or phrase that you are carrying forward from this series

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"The Spreading"

There’s a place in my brain where hate won’t grow.
—Naomi Shihab Nye, “Jerusalem”

Sometimes a seed of compassion
slips into my brain and lands in a place
where before only anger could grow.
These seeds appear
when I stop seeing humans
as only our actions and start
seeing all of us as walking wounds.
They appear when I see others
finding ways to be generous, to be kind.
If I offer the seed the barest scrap
of attention, it begins to grow roots.
Then a stem. Then seed leaves.
More leaves. A bud. But what allows
for this growth is far beyond me—
rather some gift that comes through
when me and my story get out of the way.
This is how I sometimes come to find
a whole field of inner daisies thriving
in a place I once torched to the dirt.
At first, they needed my constant care.
Then they reseeded again. And again.
They spread into such unpredictable
places. Sometimes outside my inner world.
The same way the seeds arrived in me.
Through kindness. Through love.
It’s beautiful.