How to Love the World Read online

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  Edited by Liz Bevilacqua

  Art direction and book design by Alethea Morrison

  Illustrations by © Dinara Mirtalipova

  Text © 2021 by James Crews except as shown on 187–195

  Ebook production by Slavica A. Walzl

  Ebook version 1.0

  March 23, 2021

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  Joy is the happiness that doesn’t depend on what happens.

  Brother David Steindl-Rast

  Only the creative mind can make use of hope. Only a creative people can wield it.

  Jericho Brown

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Foreword, Ross Gay

  The Necessity of Joy, James Crews

  Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, Hope

  Ted Kooser, Dandelion

  Barbara Crooker, Promise

  Amanda Gorman, At the Age of 18—Ode to Girls of Color

  Dorianne Laux, In Any Event

  Laura Grace Weldon, Astral Chorus

  Garret Keizer, My Daughter’s Singing

  David Romtvedt, Surprise Breakfast

  Ron Wallace, The Facts of Life

  Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, Fifteen Years Later, I See How It Went

  Kathryn Hunt, The Newborns

  Christen Pagett, Shells

  Laure-Anne Bosselaar, Bus Stop

  January Gill O’Neil, Hoodie

  Terri Kirby Erickson, Angel

  Todd Davis, Thankful for Now

  Reflective Pause: The Joy of Presence

  Barbara Crooker, Autism Poem: The Grid

  Diana Whitney, Kindergarten Studies the Human Heart

  Gail Newman, Valentine’s Day

  Abigail Carroll, In Gratitude

  Michelle Wiegers, Held Open

  David Graham, Listening for Your Name

  Heather Swan, Another Day Filled with Sleeves of Light,

  Annie Lighthart, A Cure Against Poisonous Thought

  Mary McCue, Forgiveness

  Heather Lanier, Two Weeks After a Silent Retreat

  Reflective Pause: The Kingdom at Hand

  Jane Hirshfield, Today, When I Could Do Nothing

  Laura Ann Reed, Red Thyme

  Laura Foley, The Once Invisible Garden

  James Crews, Down to Earth

  Freya Manfred, Old Friends

  Brad Peacock, Let It Rain

  Molly Fisk, Against Panic

  Naomi Shihab Nye, Over the Weather

  Paula Gordon Lepp, Notions

  Ellen Bass, Any Common Desolation

  Reflective Pause: Returning to the World

  Mark Nepo, Language, Prayer, and Grace

  Jane Hirshfield, The Fish

  Patricia Fargnoli, Reincarnate

  Linda Hogan, Innocence

  Farnaz Fatemi, Everything Is Made of Labor

  Susan Kelly-DeWitt, Apple Blossoms

  Nancy Miller Gomez, Growing Apples

  Danusha Laméris, Aspen

  Margaret Hasse, With Trees

  Kim Stafford, Shelter in Place

  Heather Newman, Missing Key

  Michael Kiesow Moore, Climbing the Golden Mountain

  Laura Foley, To See It

  Jacqueline Jules, Unclouded Vision

  Danusha Laméris, Improvement

  Reflective Pause: Grateful for Small Victories

  Jack Ridl, After Spending the Morning Baking Bread

  Wally Swist, Radiance

  Kristen Case, Morning

  Ross Gay, Wedding Poem

  Jehanne Dubrow, Pledge

  Angela Narciso Torres, Amores Perros

  Noah Davis, Mending

  Penny Harter, In the Dark

  Nathan Spoon, A Candle in the Night

  Francine Marie Tolf, Praise of Darkness

  Judith Chalmer, An Essay on Age

  Ted Kooser, Easter Morning

  Andrea Potos, The Cardinal Reminds Me

  Marjorie Saiser, When Life Seems a To-Do List

  Lahab Assef Al-Jundi, Moon

  Crystal S. Gibbins, Because the Night You Asked

  Rob Hunter, September Swim

  Joyce Sutphen, What to Do

  William Stafford, Any Morning

  Reflective Pause: Pieces of Heaven

  Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, How It Might Continue

  Li-Young Lee, From Blossoms

  Jessica Gigot, Motherhood

  Sarah Freligh, Wondrous

  Cathryn Essinger, Summer Apples

  Lynne Knight, Third Year of My Mother’s Dementia

  Heather Swan, Rabbit

  Dale Biron, Laughter

  January Gill O’Neil, In the Company of Women

  Alice Wolf Gilborn, Leaning to the Light

  Andrea Potos, I Watched an Angel in the Emergency Room

  Alberto Ríos, When Giving Is All We Have

  Albert Garcia, Offering

  Alison Luterman, Too Many to Count

  Marjorie Saiser, If I Carry My Father

  George Bilgere, Weather

  Sally Bliumis-Dunn, Work

  Reflective Pause: The Joy of Making

  Danusha Laméris, Goldfinches

  Connie Wanek, The Lesser Goldfinch

  Tony Hoagland, The Word

  Barbara Crooker, Tomorrow

  Cynthia White, Quail Hollow

  Laura Grace Weldon, Compost Happens

  Joan Mazza, Part of the Landscape

  Andrea Potos, Essential Gratitude

  Reflective Pause: The Gratitude List

  Laura Foley, Gratitude List

  Katherine Williams, The Dog Body of My Soul

  Katie Rubinstein, Scratch, Sniff

  Mary Elder Jacobsen, Summer Cottage

  Jane Kenyon, Coming Home at Twilight in Late Summer

  Grace Bauer, Perceptive Prayer

  Patricia Fontaine, Sap Icicles

  Lucille Clifton, the lesson of the falling leaves

  Ted Kooser, A Dervish of Leaves

  James Crews, Winter Morning

  Tracy K. Smith, The Good Life

  Marjorie Saiser, Thanksgiving for Two

  Reflective Pause: The Feast of Each Moment

  Jeffrey Harrison, Nest

  Ellen Bass, Getting into Bed on a December Night

  Lisa Coffman, Everybody Made Soups

  James Crews, Darkest Before Dawn

  Brad Peacock, Rosary

  Julie Murphy, To Ask

  Tess Taylor, There Doesn’t
Need to Be a Poem

  Amy Dryansky, Wingspan

  Joy Harjo, Eagle Poem

  Terri Kirby Erickson, What Matters

  Mark Nepo, In Love with the World

  Reading Group Questions and Topics for Discussion

  Poet Biographies

  Credits

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  Acknowledgments

  Deep gratitude to the many people who helped to make this book a reality: the team at Storey Publishing, for agreeing to take a chance on a book of poetry, especially Deborah Balmuth, Liz Bevilacqua, Alee Moncy, Jennifer Travis, and Melinda Slaving, as well as Lauren Moseley at Algonquin Books for publicity support; Katie Rubinstein for making the connection and her beautiful work; everyone at A Network for Grateful Living, especially Kristi Nelson and Saoirse McClory, for their support of poetry; Brother David Steindl-Rast for his teachings on gratefulness, which we need now more than ever; Ted Kooser, for his enduring friendship, inspiration, and example of kindness; the late, great David Clewell, whose exuberant spirit not only made me fall in love with poetry, but also led me to future mentors Ron Wallace and Jesse Lee Kercheval; all of the poets included here for their generosity in sharing their work; Ross Gay for writing a foreword that is both a blessing and a poem in and of itself; Naomi Shihab Nye, Maria Popova, and Elizabeth Berg for their support of writing that makes us all feel more human; Garland Richmond, Diana Whitney, Heather Newman, Heather Swan, and Michelle Wiegers for essential support; my students at SUNY-Albany and Eastern Oregon University for giving me hope and serving as first readers; my husband, Brad Peacock, and our Crews and Peacock families, for reminding me every day why I’m so grateful to be alive.

  Foreword

  I have been spending a lot of time lately thinking about witness, about how witness itself is a kind of poetics, or poesis, which means making. By which I mean I have been wondering about how we make the world in our witnessing of it. Or maybe I have come to understand, to believe, how we witness makes our world. This is why attending to what we love, what we are astonished by, what flummoxes us with beauty, is such crucial work. Such rigorous work. Likewise, studying how we care, and are cared for, how we tend and are tended to, how we give and are given, is such necessary work. It makes the world. Witnessing how we are loved and how we love makes the world. Witness and study, I should say. Witness as study, I think I mean.

  Truth is, we are mostly too acquainted with the opposite, with the wreckage. It commands our attention, and for good reason. We have to survive it. But even if we need to understand the wreckage to survive it, it needn’t be the primary object of our study. The survival need be. The reaching and the holding need be. The here, have this need be. The come in, you can stay here need be. The let’s share it all need be. The love need be. The care need be. That which we are made by, held by, need be. Who’s taken us in need be. Who’s saved the seed need be. Who’s planted the milkweed need be. Who’s saved the water need be. Who’s saved the forest need be. The forest need be. The water. The breathable air. That which witnessed us forth need be. How we have been loved need be. How we are loved need be.

  How we need need be, too. Our radiant need. Our luminous and mycelial need. Our need immense and immeasurable. Our need absolute need be. And that study, that practice, that witness, is called gratitude. Our gratitude need be.

  This is what I want to study. This is with whom.

  Ross Gay

  The Necessity of Joy

  One day a few weeks ago, I woke up in a terrible mood. I’ve always been a morning person, relishing those early hours when the world is still asleep, before emails, texts, and the rest of my distractions take over. I love the ritual of making pour-over coffee for my husband and myself, inhaling the fragrant steam that curls up from the grounds as I pour on the boiling water. Yet this day, I couldn’t shake my annoyance as I smashed a pat of cold, hard butter onto my toast, tearing a hole in the bread. I shook my head and scowled, then looked over at my husband who smiled. “What?” I said. He just stared deeply into my eyes and asked, “Are you happy to be alive today?” I glared at him at first, but I also let his question stop my mind. And in that gap, a rush of gratitude swept in. Yes, I was happy to be alive, happy to be standing in the kitchen next to the man I love, about to begin another day together. Happy to have coffee, food, and a warm place to live. Happy even to feel that dark mood swirling through me because it was also evidence of my aliveness.

  Are you happy to be alive? The poems gathered in this book each ask, in their own ways, that same question, which has more relevance now than ever. As Brother David Steindl-Rast, the founder of A Network for Grateful Living, has famously pointed out: “In daily life, we must see that it is not happiness that makes us grateful. It is gratefulness that makes us happy.” Paying attention to our lives is the first step toward gratitude and hope, and the poems in How to Love the World model for us the kind of mindfulness that is the gateway to a fuller, more sustainable happiness that can be called joy. Whether blessing a lawn full of common dandelions, or reminding us, as Tony Hoagland does, to “sit out in the sun and listen,” these poets know that hope, no matter how slight it might seem, is as pressing a human need right now as food, water, shelter, or rest. We may survive without it, but we cannot thrive.

  During these uncertain and trying times, we tell ourselves that joy is an indulgence we can no longer afford. And we’ve become all too familiar with the despair filling the airwaves and crowding our social media feeds, leading to what psychologists now call empathy or compassion fatigue, whereby we grow numb and disconnected from the suffering of others. We want to stay informed about what’s going on in the world, yet we also know that absorbing so much negativity leaves us drained and hopeless. We know it’s robbing us of the ability to be present to our own experience and grateful for something as simple as the moon, which is here, as Lahab Assef Al-Jundi points out, “to illuminate our illusion” of separateness from one another.

  For many years, reading and writing poetry has been my personal source of delight, an antidote to the depression that can spring up out of nowhere. I now carve out what I call “soul time” for myself each day, making space for silence and reflection, even if it is just five or ten minutes, even if I have to wake up a little earlier to do it. The time I take to pause and read a favorite poem from a book, or jot down some small kindness from the day before, can utterly transform my mindset for the rest of the day. I invite you to use each poem in How to Love the World in a similar way, to make reading (and writing, if you wish) part of your own daily gratitude practice. Throughout the collection, I’ve also included reflective pauses, with specific suggestions for writing practices based upon the poems. When you encounter one of these, you may simply read that poem and reflection, then move on. Or you might keep a notebook nearby and stop to write, letting the guiding questions lead you more deeply into your own encounters with gratitude, hope, and joy. I encourage you to use any of these poems that spark something as jumping-off points for a journal entry, story, or poem of your own.

  I trust in the necessity and pleasure of all kinds of creativity—from cooking a meal to fixing a car to sketching in the margins of a grocery list—but poetry is an art form especially suited to our challenging times. It helps us dive beneath the surface of our lives, and enter a place of wider, wilder, more universal knowing. And because poetry is made of the everyday material of language, we each have access to its ability to hold truths that normal conversation simply can’t contain. When you find a poem that speaks to exactly what you’ve felt but had no way to name, a light bulb flashes in some hidden part of the self that you might have forgotten was there. I’ll never forget the first time I read Ellen Bass’s poem, “Any Common Desolation,” and rushed to share it with my friends and family. “You may have to break your heart,” Bass writes, suggesting that we might need to be more open and vulnerable to the world than we feel we can stand at time
s, but then she reminds us, “it isn’t nothing to know even one moment alive.” We need poems like the ones gathered here to ground us in our lives, to find in each new moment what Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer describes as, “the chance for joy, whole orchards of amazement.”

  James Crews, July 2020

  Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

  Hope

  Hope has holes

  in its pockets.

  It leaves little

  crumb trails

  so that we,

  when anxious,

  can follow it.

  Hope’s secret:

  it doesn’t know

  the destination—

  it knows only

  that all roads

  begin with one

  foot in front

  of the other.

  Ted Kooser

  Dandelion

  The first of a year’s abundance of dandelions

  is this single kernel of bright yellow

  dropped on our path by the sun, sensing

  that we might need some marker to help us

  find our way through life, to find a path

  over the snow-flattened grass that was

  blade by blade unbending into green,

  on a morning early in April, this happening

  just at the moment I thought we were lost

  and I’d stopped to look around, hoping

  to see something I recognized. And there

  it was, a commonplace dandelion, right

  at my feet, the first to bloom, especially

  yellow, as if pleased to have been the one,

  chosen from all the others, to show us the way.

  Barbara Crooker

  Promise

  This day is an open road

  stretching out before you.

  Roll down the windows.

  Step into your life, as if it were a fast car.

  Even in industrial parks,

  trees are covered with white blossoms,

  festive as brides, and the air is soft

  as a well-washed shirt on your arms.

  The grass has turned implausibly green.

  Tomorrow, the world will begin again,

  another fresh start. The blue sky stretches,