Poem | Love After Love by Derek Walcott

Today I’d like to share with you a poem about self-love. Before I start giving you my thoughts, have a read through the poem and decide for yourself what you think this narrator is recovering from.

A Poem About Loving Our Beautiful Horrible World | Good Bones by Maggie Smith

This is one of those poems that gives solace by putting your complicated feelings into beautiful words.

“Good Bones” is about making peace with the grim aspects of the world without closing your eyes to them. I often struggle with loving our world as there are so many horrors taking place in it, and I’m sure I’m not the only one.

A Dark Poem by Robert Frost | Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Today’s poem is very suitable for these cold & dreary January days. It reads quite easily, but the interpretation is less straightforward and can be quite bleak.

CW: suicide

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

by Robert Frost

Whose woods these are I think I know.   
His house is in the village though;   
He will not see me stopping here   
To watch his woods fill up with snow.   

A Wintery Poem by Robert Hayden | BE Winter Day 18

Today’s prompt for the Bookending Winter Event (click here for more info) is as follows:

Find a Winter-themed poem and explain what you like about it. The really brave among us may also write their own poems.

I chose this poem by Robert Hayden because it is an anecdote that really pulls my heartstrings and contains very vivid descriptions about what cold feels like. I’ll go more into detail below.

Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

Poem | Tired by Langston Hughes

“Well that’s depressing,” said my boyfriend as I showed him this journal page. And I can see why: regarding life as one big wait is awful. Plus, if we view the poem in an autobiographical light, we can depend upon it that in Hughes’ life as a black man in the 1920s the world was very far from “good and beautiful and kind” to him.

However, the poem is not dispiriting. Apart from giving the gritty pleasure of someone putting into words your own angry feelings, it also includes a call to action: to “cut the world in two”  and analyse what the root of the problem is so we can address it.

Poetry | doom rolled in glitter by leena norms

This is a zine by Leena Norms, who (among other things) gives very good book recommendations & life advice on YouTube. I’d never read a zine before, but I love me some good poetry and the concept seemed very exciting, so I gave this one a go. I loved it! 

The zine holds enough poems to be a small book of poetry, but this medium makes it feel far more intimate. Rather than travelling through a publishing house, a printer, a distribution center and a book store this zine was sent to me directly from its author. Leena Norms shared videos on Instagram of the stacks of zines in her house and gave updates on the painstaking work of putting each zine in an envelope, addressing it and walking it to the post office, which made the project feel personal. (And a bit surreal, not gonna lie. As if this was Willy Wonka TV.)