EPISODE 365 | One Poem Only

Today marks one year of one poem only, 365 days of returning to poetry,

of making space for one poem every day, of listening closely. Before anything else,

I want to thank the many wonderful poets who trusted me with their work this year

and allowed me to share their poems here. This project exists because of your generosity,

your language, and the lives you placed inside your lines. When I thought about what I wanted to

read for the anniversary, I chose poems that felt true to this moment. One reminds us of what poetry

makes possible and one asks what we might make of the world we've been given. The first is by Emily

Dickinson, a poet who understood that language can build a house larger than the one we live in.

The second is my own, writing from the feeling that even in difficult times,

creation remains a form of freedom. Together, they feel that companions. One reminds us that

imagination is a place to dwell, the other, that when what surrounds us begins to fall,

we are capable of making something new. Thank you for spending this year with me.

Now to today's poems. I dwell in possibility, a fairer house than prose, more numerous of windows,

superior for doors. Of chambers as the cedars, impregnable of I, and for an everlasting roof,

the gambrels of the sky, of visitors, the fairest, for occupation, this, the spreading wide my narrow

hands together paradise by Emily Dickinson. There's something poetic about a country eating itself

alive to appease the gods of private equity, while stars are singing to us from the cosmos.

Children go hungry, but if you're not, they trim the fat and the waste and the bloated,

seeping fools will realize too late that a country without its people is no country at all.

There's something poetic about letting it all fall away and giving up the fight,

not because we know we lost, but because the fight is not ours. It never has been.

We are free now to create something new. For those who care, will we save the world?

No, that is not our task. We will save ourselves as the world spins around the sun.

Bye Maggie Devers. Thank you for listening, Poetry Lover.

Here's to 365, and counting.