May Open-Mic Collection

A group of poets gathered online a little over a week ago to read their beautiful poems to each other. I want to share a sampling of what we experienced for everyone a wider audience to enjoy. I hope you’ll appreciate the diversity of voices and styles here. Most poems are followed by the author reading it in their own voice.

I share a new poem of my own every Wednesday morning and today is no exception. My new poem The Wild Things is the final poem in the post.

Photo by Shane Rounce on Unsplash

The Unpromised Land by Betsy Johnson

We are raising children for a world that’s already shed its skin.
We tell stories about a world
where work meant building, mending,
where hands shaped bread,
and voices filled rooms with song, not just data.
Now, the wires run deeper than roots.
Jobs that gave people purpose, 
like teaching, painting, listening, 
are traded for code,
the old pride of craft replaced by
algorithms that never sleep, never dream, never tire.
Children watch us struggle to matter
in a world that rewards the machine
for being tireless,
and forgets what it means to be tender.

Outside, the seasons shift in ways we can't predict.
Summer stretches too long, rivers run dry,
the air thickens with smoke and warning.
We talk about recycling, but the storms keep coming,
the ocean keeps rising, and we wonder what it means
to hand our children a sun that burns too bright,
a sky that can’t remember how to cool itself down.

At dinner, we try to explain
why some leaders build walls
and others light torches,
why neighbors are taught to fear the sound of a different name.
History’s shadow grows longer,
and we watch old dangers
dress themselves in new uniforms,
marching down streets
we once thought were safe.

There’s a hunger in their eyes for something real,
earth under fingernails,
the honest patience of growing things,
the hush of trees.
But nature is now something to be scheduled,
a weekend activity, not the home it was to us.

Still, in the quiet just before morning,
I watch them find new ways to be gentle
with what little we’ve left them.
They send goodnight texts to people miles away,
let laughter cross the distance,
hold onto the soft glow of a screen
like it’s a candle in a dark room.
There’s something stubborn in them,
a kind of hope that keeps moving forward,
no matter how much the world tries to forget itself.

We cannot promise
the world we wanted for them.
But we can teach them
to meet uncertainty with open hands,
to fight for each other
when the powerful demand silence,
to remember that purpose is not
something a machine can steal
if we keep making meaning
from what is broken.

Let them be fierce in their wonder,
tender in their courage,
and relentless in their love.
Let them build what we could not imagine,
rooted in truth,
fed by the stubborn light that survives every storm.
If the old world is gone,
may the new one they make
be more honest, more just,
and finally….more alive.

Author's note: When we think about our children, and the world they’re stepping into, our love is tangled up with worry, hope, and uncertainty. What have we handed them, in our striving and our mistakes? What does it mean to raise kids in a time when so much is shifting under our feet?

---

Photo by Lucas Ferreira on Unsplash

Urban Twilight by Adriana

Dear urban twilight, I promise to change.
The quiet, the sway, the ordinary companion
resting in the pale dress of you. I learned a woman
like you could wander into town and show me
how to float like a leaf across air. I wanted
to stay small awhile. I wanted to be your small one.
I practiced forgiving gently. I cupped my chest
for growing in its own patient way, a kind affair
with a body that stayed. dear urban twilight, I believed
you had sung the word natural, and when my Father
stepped inside one evening, loosening his resting boot, saying,
Every time I felt like a dog in my own heart, it was fear.
I wanted to sit as lightly as the soft sole
of that boot. I wanted to be a stone warmed
in your palm, to love my friends with letters.

And it was only
after I met my own love-mirror (and let her go),
only yesterday, when I lifted a northern shoveler
from the beach where crows circled, her wing
pressed tight to the bowl of my ribs,
only after placing her at the edge of a canal,
where she folded into the long quiet
work of resting, that I realized what I had wanted
most was to be held by someone determined
to keep me, someone against whom I could lean
my unfinished chest, who’d offer me
not just the time of my life, but inhibitions.
Yes, all the times I felt like a dog in my own heart,
I was held tight in fear. You were right.
You were the moon chasing the sound,
A neon movement beneath me,
And I heard you all around me,
Luxuriating in the wind.

---

Photo by Aleksandr Kadykov on Unsplash

trip to the hardware store by PD Hurt

              whose to 
          say that existence
   didn/t begin at this exact
         moment   a blip
                      that/s  		gone
on longer than intended
                snap
                   crackle
                       and pop
                  rode the first detectible
                    sound wave.    but ears
                  hadn/t been invented yet to
                      distinguish
                   which was 
                 which
         and what
from what
         naked atoms
    to nosebleeds
          and all other things nestled in between
they/re found in dreams   doubledog
     daring the dreamer to make
     a spare key for their 
     closest friends

---

Photo Credit: Sara Joy Tiberio

Wild Horse Willing by Sara Joy Tiberio 

We follow the crooning song
of dawn, soft desert daybreak
breathes as dust
staining the air, we're here
chasing blue sky sermons
under a cloudless cathedral,
walking between palo verde 
and saguaros, until we find 
the Salt River horses,
and pace their gait,

willing them to teach us
to rewild ourselves, reclaim 
what we gave away, spirits lifting
with every glisten
of sweat on sorrel coats,
the herd moving as water
through cracked earth,
my feet yearning to know
what old stories
are offered to hooves
drumming the ground,
in rhythm with the desperate 
hum of natural life.

Heat begins to bake
the back of our necks,
red mountains offer a 
desolate, dream-like backdrop,
our vision blurs with sunspots,
and for a second we forget
we're human and lose
ourselves to the Sonoran silence,
swelling with a stray breeze,
the hope in our chests
loping along.

Note: the cello music in the background of the reading is Sara’s original composition and performance. The photo above is also hers. She is truly a multi-talented artist.

---

Photo by Alexandr Popadin on Unsplash

Birth by David Linebarger

You’re here one month early,
the scalpel visible
from where I sit
with my notebook of fears,
palimpsests of ghosts
on fingers of air.

The nurse blurs by
in a moment of white,
cuts through the air
of cool anesthesia.

I watch the first spank
with no response,
then another, and another,
please breath, please breathe…

Outside the window 
a precarious branch
that holds the world.

Tomorrow’s bird comes.
Small mouths open 
to swallow the sky. 

---

Photo by Marcus Woodbridge on Unsplash

Lighthouse and the Rolling Sea by Rae McMinn Kaigler 

Our first conversation was a call-and-response song
back when you were a different fruit each week
and I was a rolling sea. I sang,
you stilled, till the end of the song
then you lit up my belly, all fists and feet. So it figured

you’d come out tracking hushed conversations,
so vigilant, you only slept touching me,
the only toddler in the grocery line screaming
When you die, who my mama gonna be?

Now your tender teen frame swims out near the break,
from my spot on the beach, you’re a pink fleck in the ocean,
and only because you’re mine,

can I see you study each wave, ask it
whether to lift your arms and rise up or dive in,
trusting the pull, pitch, and roll to release you
on the other side. If I could,

I’d fill our house with the sea,
if it would help you ride the heave of change and let go
of what has already broken and is washing ashore

after a year of volatility. Adult problems we said
because we wanted to protect you, but you’re too perceptive
to miss a thing, too earnest to accept any truth

that is partial. You go down fighting
not even sure what for, eyes wet, your posture protective,
your heart a compass, a knife in your teeth. I’ve told you

this world needs girls like you,
like polar bears need ice, like apple trees need rain.
This ship needs a lighthouse. Watching you in the surf,
I remember

a lighthouse also needs the sea, how
when you were born and I sang our song,

you went soft in my arms instantly.

---

Photo Credit: Andy Smith

The Wild Things by Andy Smith

Don’t forget to allow 
your bones to sink soft 
into soil. Transplant your body 
into the earth and open your 
toes to its stillness. 

Planted, limited, and held still— 
the breeze will discover your hair 
making it shimmer like an aspen grove.
The sun will find its way to your skin, 
warming, caressing, even burning 
with the intensity of her gifts. 
When your feet are so rooted that you fear 
you may never move again, 
only then will you begin to 
consider the lilies and the birds, 
seeing as if for the first time the dandelion’s smile 
the mischievous morning glory’s games and 
the caterpillar's curious trust in resurrection. 
Let the clouds fill the sail tethered to your mind
and carry it as a seed to waiting ground. 

And if you can ignore the rising panic of stillness
and dare to stay rooted, you may even 
begin to feel the sap of belonging  
seep up your spine reminding you that 
the wild things have always been your kin.

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Thank you for spending time with these beautiful poems. Thank you to the poets here who have shared their work with me and with you.