More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees that really gets to me. When all the shock of white and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath, the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin growing over whatever winter did to us, a return to the strange idea of continuous living despite the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then, I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.
- Ada Limón
The Laura Factor
If you know Laura Baudo Sillerman, you have experienced The Laura Factor.
As we know, she knows a lot about a lot. And she remembers everything—the facts, their significance, to whom they matter, and why.
When we are playing one of the parlor games, of which she is so fond, we do well to consider The Laura Factor. Playing charades? You want The Laura Factor on your team. If she’s not on your team, it’s important to note that the Laura Factor is on the other team. Doing the crossword? The Laura Factor will get it done.
When driving in two cars, choose the one that has The Laura Factor. Better yet, let The Factor drive.
The Laura Factor is portable and telepathic. She herself need not be present to be helpful. When I’m at a crossroads, on the horns of a dilemma, dithering, procrastinating, fulminating, I think, “What would Laura do?” and I factor it in. The Factor was cultivated at Marietta College, and now has influence world-wide.
Let us celebrate The Factor, which is in this very room, at this very moment.
Raise your glass, and may the Factor be with you.
- Carol Gilbert
In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa
Arching under the night sky inky with black expansiveness, we point to the planets we know, we pin quick wishes on stars. From earth, we read the sky as if it is an unerring book of the universe, expert and evident.
Still, there are mysteries below our sky: the whale song, the songbird singing its call in the bough of a wind-shaken tree.
We are creatures of constant awe, curious at beauty, at leaf and blossom, at grief and pleasure, sun and shadow.
And it is not darkness that unites us, not the cold distance of space, but the offering of water, each drop of rain, each rivulet, each pulse, each vein.
O second moon, we, too, are made of water, of vast and beckoning seas.
We, too, are made of wonders, of great and ordinary loves, of small invisible worlds, of a need to call out through the dark. - Ada Limón
It is not the ones who throw roses
On your grave
Who realize your life didn’t die It’s the ones
You rode with on the roller coaster, Who you made love with, It’s the children who learned from you To laugh exactly the way you do... They are where Your life went.
- Joseph Pintauro
An Estate
The swimming pool appears to lack one edge. Water strains gently at its own meniscus and overflows the blue slate to allege to the god of boundaries that there are no boundaries.
The bathhouse is a fane of Alaskan cedar, a virgin forest marked out and consumed, all for the delight of a Japanese master, and without the use of a single nail.
A Brahms quintet leaks from the undergrowth around each supine body and beaded drink. She leads us through a blushing sandstone labyrinth, flanking inducements of the sybaritic
to stoop gracefully where a cliff swallow lies motionless, small stunned voluptuary, in noon’s thin margin of glass and shadow; and though she leaves for Anguilla on Tuesday,
pelagic traveler, to her alone (not to a guest whom privilege makes passive) it falls to cup that body’s buff and cinnamon and raise it to us, ruffled and alive.
i.m. Laura Baudo Sillerman (1947-2024)
- Karl Kirchwey
There are Stars
There are stars whose radiance is visible on Earth though they have long been extinct.
There are people whose brilliance continues to light the world even though they are no longer among the living.
These lights are particularly bright when the night is dark. They light the way for humankind.
- Hannah Senesh
Friendship
Oh the comfort — the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a personhaving neither to weigh thoughts, nor measure words, but pouring them all right out, just as they are, chaff and grain together; certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keepingand with the breath of kindness blow the rest away.
- Dinah Maria Craik (1826-87)
The Small Man Builds Cages for Everyone
The small man Builds cages for everyone He Knows.
While the sage, Who has to duck his head When the moon is low, Keeps dropping keys all night long
