A Rose Amidst the Thorns: Poems about Beauty Balancing Pain

In the face of horrors visited upon our world daily, in the struggle to protect our loved ones, choosing to let in joy is a revolutionary act. Joy returns us to everything that is good and beautiful and worth fighting for.
— Valarie Kaur

Poetry often gives us implicit messages. The takeaway is there if you think about it, as many an English teacher tries to convey, teaching us to read between the lines.

At other times it's right out there. This collection of poems falls into that category: poems in which the poet reflects directly on the stark contrasts between the many beauties in the world and its many agonies and cruelties.

John Ruskin, a prolific English author, poet, painter, philosopher, and social critic, wrote a book he titled The Duty of Delight. Critical of the Victorian Christians of his time, he wrote that they “dwell only on the duty of self-denial but exhibit not the duty of delight.”

Social activist and writer Dorothy Day used this phrase often, including as the title of a collection of her journal entries (*affiliate link). From a footnote in the book: "this phrase came to serve for Dorothy as a call to mindfulness in the face of drudgery and sorrow."

Or, as the Buddha said, "No mud, no lotus."

Sojourner Truth may have said it best: “Life is a hard battle anyway. If we laugh and sing a little as we fight the good fight of freedom, it makes it all go easier. I will not allow my life’s light to be determined by the darkness around me.”

These poems remind me of how incredibly fortunate I've been for the majority of my life, and how many don't have that same good fortune. 

They remind me to recommit to working for justice.

They remind me to pay attention.

As always, I've shared a brief excerpt from each poem. Follow the link to read the complete work.

"A Brief for the Defense"
Jack Gilbert

We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world.

"The News"
Emilie Lygren

Each morning we listen for what is breaking—

the sound of a thousand tragedies fills the air,
shattering that never stops,
headlines, a fleet of anchors tangled at our feet.

"Everything is Plundered, Betrayed, Sold"
Anna Akhmatova, translated by Stanley Kunitz

Why then do we not despair?
By day, from the surrounding woods,
cherries blow summer into town;
at night the deep transparent skies
glitter with new galaxies.

"Testimony"
Rebecca Baggett

I want to say, like Neruda,
that I am waiting for
"a great and common tenderness,"
that I still believe
we are capable of attention,
that anyone who notices the world
must want to save it.

"Adrift"
Mark Nepo

Everything is beautiful and I am so sad.
This is how the heart makes a duet of
wonder and grief. The light spraying
through the lace of the fern is as delicate
as the fibers of memory forming their web
around the knot in my throat.

"Fear and Love"
Jim Moore 

I wish I could make the argument that a river
and a sunset plus a calm disregard of the ego
are enough. But whatever comes next must include
tents in the parking lot, that homeless camp
on the way to the airport,
and the hole in your cheek
from the cancer removed yesterday.

"September, 1918"
Amy Lowell

Some day there will be no war,
Then I shall take out this afternoon
And turn it in my fingers,
And remark the sweet taste of it upon my palate,
And note the crisp variety of its flights of leaves.

"Prayer"
Teddy Macker 

dear lord in this time of darkness
may we be unafraid to mourn and together and hugely

may dignity lose its scaffolding
faces crumble like bricks

dear lord let grief come to grief

and then o lord help us to see the bees yet in the lavender
the spokes of sunlight down through the oaks

"Sometimes"
David Budbill

I know in the next minute or tomorrow all this may be
taken from me, and therefore I've got to say, right now,
what I feel and know and see, I've got to say, right now,
how beautiful and sweet this world can be.

"Sweetness"
Stephen Dunn

Often a sweetness comes   
as if on loan, stays just long enough   

to make sense of what it means to be alive,
   then returns to its dark   
source. As for me, I don’t care   

where it’s been, or what bitter road
   it’s traveled   
to come so far, to taste so good.

"Please"
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

We need you to remind us we can
be furious and scared and near feral
over injustice and still thrill at the taste
of a strawberry, ripe and sweet,
can still meet a stranger and shake
their hand, believing in their humanness.

"Thanks"
W.S. Merwin

with the animals dying around us
taking our feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
thank you we are saying and waving
dark though it is

A question for you: Do you have a favorite poem, or one that's painful to read, that belongs on this list? I have the memory of reading another one that has been reprinted many places that I now can't find so I'd love to get more titles and links.

Related reading

• We Are the Ones We've Been Waiting For: Poems for Activists and Advocates
• The Quotidian: Poems Celebrating the Everyday, the Ordinary
• What I Stand For
• Is There Such a Thing as a Lowercase "nazi"?
• Riding Thoughts: Privilege Is a Tailwind 
• Street of Dreams: Can We Live the Martin Luther King, Jr. Way?
• A Thrilling Night 
• Give Your Power to Truth: What Story Are You Writing for Your Life?
• Personal Privilege and Biking: It Takes More than a Bike Lane to Start Riding
• My poetry round-ups on a variety of topics

*Bookshop.org affiliate link. If you purchase through this link I receive a teensy tiny commission. Any commissions received will be donated to nonprofit organizations working for social justice and transportation equity.

Thanks + Giving

I visit grateful.org as part of my morning poetry + coffee routine, so I don't wait for the fourth Thursday in November to think about gratitude. That said, I am extra thankful for the four-day weekend. 

With the history I've learned in recent years that they didn't teach me in school I think more about Indigenous people than about Pilgrims. Friday is Native American Heritage Day now, making Thursday Native American Heritage Day Eve. I share Indigenous writers year round on social media and make an extra point of doing so around this time of year.

The quotation from Thich Nhat Hanh below and the graphic I borrowed from Rebecca Solnit's post on BlueSky point to something else we may forget when we give thanks: How is whatever we're thankful for possible? Whose hands and which resources were used to create what we appreciate? Have we thanked them directly? What's going to happen to the waste created in all these processes? (Go watch Buy Now: The Shopping Conspiracy on Netflix if you're wondering about that.)

"This food is the gift of the whole universe: the earth, the sky and much hard work. May we live in a way that makes us worthy to receive it. May we transform our own unskilled states of mind and learn to eat with moderation. May we take only foods that nourish us and prevent illness. We accept this food so that we may realize the path of understanding and love."
—Thich Nhat Hanh

Yes, yes, it's still an occasion for food celebrations. With my mom and her delicious pies long gone there's no big clan gathering for this meal. Each of my siblings has their own practices and nuclear families to think about and we live far away from each other. Now the "gathering" consists of sharing photos of turkey prep and pie decor.

A few years ago when we still had four kids in their teens/20s who would be with us for Thanksgiving I changed my approach from “must produce amazing spread all at once” to “Favorites Four-Day Weekend.” I asked everyone their favorite foods, especially ones you might associate with Thanksgiving traditions but that wasn’t a requirement. I committed to making at least one favorite for everyone over the course of the weekend and laid in lots of cheese, crackers, and other noshes. 

Each day I cooked what I felt like cooking from that list, never attempting to have a full meal available at an appointed time. We might have pie in the morning and dressing for lunch along with whatever else people felt like snacking on. Meals weren’t scheduled; people ate when they were hungry.

It was fabulous.

I love to cook but the timing and variety are killers for one person to produce. My mom had a systematic approach that extended to planning which serving dish and utensil would be used for each mandatory food item. I’ve done it occasionally, I’m capable of it, but that’s not fun for me any more.

Now those kids are far-flung adults and my husband has a very restrictive diet for health reasons. On these long weekends I cook what I feel like cooking over the four days to continue the tradition and have video calls with the kids, whom we visit at other times of year when it isn’t such a travel nightmare.

Also fabulous.

I'm breaking the words "thanks" and "giving" apart and sharing some poems on the topics. I like the older-sounding "giving thanks" as a phrase so I'll start with giving. As always, I'm excerpting the poems and not necessarily providing the opening lines. But first:

Giving Ideas

• American Indian College Fund
• Potlatch Fund
• Laurel Rubin Farm Worker Justice Project, Latino Community Fund
• Northwest Immigrant Rights Project
• Refugee Women's Alliance
• Cesar Chavez Foundation

Giving

"When Giving Is All We Have"
Alberto Rios

We give because someone gave to us.
We give because nobody gave to us.

We give because giving has changed us.
We give because giving could have changed us.

"A Prayer Among Friends"
John Daniel

Among other wonders of our lives, we are alive
with one another, we walk here
in the light of this unlikely world
that isn't ours for long.
May we spend generously
the time we are given.
May we enact our responsibilities
as thoroughly as we enjoy
our pleasures. 

"On Giving"
Kahlil Gibran

There are those who give little of the much which they have—and they give it for recognition and their hidden desire makes their gifts unwholesome.
And there are those who have little and give it all.
These are the believers in life and the bounty of life, and their coffer is never empty.

Thanks

I remember one Thanksgiving when my quiet dad, sitting down for our very secular feast, pulled a "Dear Abby" clipping out of his pocket and shared this reading as grace. This was so out of character that we all sat quiet for a few moments after he stopped reading. It's by Pauline Phillips, AKA Abigail Van Buren, and is posted every year by her daughter Jeanne Phillips who now writes the Dear Abby columns.

Oh, Heavenly Father,
We thank Thee for food and remember the hungry.
We thank Thee for health and remember the sick.
We thank Thee for friends and remember the friendless.
We thank Thee for freedom and remember the enslaved.
May these remembrances stir us to service.
That Thy gifts to us may be used for others.

Amen.

Then there's the gratitude that comes from awareness of the details.

"Thanksgiving"
Tim Nolan

Thanks for the Italian chestnuts—with their
tough shells—the smooth chocolaty
skin of them—thanks for the boiling water—

itself a miracle and a mystery—
thanks for the seasoned sauce pan
and the old wooden spoon—and all

the neglected instruments in the drawer—

Feeling grateful takes many forms in the body, as Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer describes.

"A Partial List of Gratefulnesses"
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

There’s the giddy gratefulness that sparkles
like morning sun on the river and the peaceful
gratefulness that soothes like warm wind.
There’s the gratefulness that almost hurts
as it squeezes tight around the heart,
the gratefulness that arrives quiet as cat’s paws
in the night, and the gratefulness that thrums
and swirls in us as if we’re a sky full of starlings.

"To Say Nothing but Thank You"
Jeanne Lohman

All day I try to say nothing but thank you,
breathe the syllables in and out with every step I
take through the rooms of my house and outside into
a profusion of shaggy-headed dandelions in the garden
where the tulips’ black stamens shake in their crimson cups.

"Thanks" 
W.S. Merwin

Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water thanking it
smiling by the windows looking out
in our directions

"Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude"
Ross Gay

thank you what in us rackets glad
what gladrackets us;

and thank you, too, this knuckleheaded heart, this pelican heart,
this gap-toothed heart flinging open its gaudy maw
to the sky, 

And finally, the ultimate gratitude for the world we're a part of and all who came before, everything that makes our lives possible.

"Remember"
Joy Harjo

"Remember the earth whose skin you are:
red earth, black earth, yellow earth, white earth
brown earth, we are earth."

"I’m going to eat some turkey. But not in honor of some mythic coming together of Natives and colonizers. Because it’s delicious. The fight will still be there after that turkey, and I’ll be ready."
—Adrienne Keene, citizen of Cherokee Nation, founder of Native Appropriations

"The path to reconciliation starts with honest acknowledgement of our past, with open eyes and open hearts for a better future." 
—Matika Wilbur, Swinomish and Tulalip, photographer

Related Reading

• Whose lands are you living on? Native Lands map
• Thanksgiving is an act, not a menu
• Being Thankful (Mindful) Every Day
• In Which I Give Thanks for Biking
• Giving Thanks for Bicycles
• "We Are Still Here": Indigenous-Focused Bicycle Programs

Earth Day Poems for Every Day

Every day really is Earth Day. What else could it be? Knowing that, how will you choose to live?

As with all my collections of poetry I've chosen a few lines to excerpt, not necessarily the first lines in the poem. Follow the links to read the full work.

"Earth Day" by Jane Yolen

As long as life,
As dear, as free,
I am the Earth
And the Earth is me. 

"Make the Earth Your Companion" by J. Patrick Lewis

Make the Earth your companion.
Walk lightly on it, as other creatures do.

"Gravity" by Donna Hilbert

This is why we call the earth Mother,
why all rising is a miracle.

"Treat Each Bear" by Gary Lawless

Treat each bear as the last bear.
Each wolf the last, each caribou.
Each track the last track.

"School Prayer" by Diane Ackerman

I swear I will not dishonor
my soul with hatred,
but offer myself humbly
as a guardian of nature,

"For All" by Gary Snyder

I pledge allegiance to the soil
            of Turtle Island,
and to the beings who thereon dwell
             one ecosystem
             in diversity
             under the sun
With joyful interpenetration for all.

"Love in a Time of Climate Change" by Craig Santos Perez

I love you as one loves the most vulnerable
species: urgently, between the habitat and its loss.

"Beginners" by Denise Levertov

-- we have only begun

to imagine justice and mercy,
only begun to envision

how it might be
to live as siblings with beast and flower,
not as oppressors.

"Untitled [Earth teach me stillness]" by Nancy Wood

Earth teach me caring
    as the mother who secures her young.
Earth teach me courage
    as the tree which stands all alone.

"When the Animals" by Gary Lawless

When the plants speak to us

     in their delicate, beautiful language,

     will we be able to answer them?

"2007, VI [It is hard to have hope]" by Wendell Berry

Because we have not made our lives to fit
our places, the forests are ruined, the fields eroded,
the streams polluted, the mountains overturned. Hope
then to belong to your place by your own knowledge
of what it is that no other place is, and by
your caring for it as you care for no other place, this
place that you belong to though it is not yours,
for it was from the beginning and will be to the end.

"Map" by Linda Hogan

This is the map of the forsaken world.
This is the world without end
where forests have been cut away from their trees.
These are the lines wolf could not pass over.

"Anthropocene: A Dictionary" by Jake Skeets

diyóół        : wind (

                         wind (more of it) more wind as in (to come up)
                         plastic bags driftwood the fence line 

"Makers" by Pamela Alexander 

We dried rivers or dammed them, made
music, treaties, money, promises.
Made more and more of our kind,
which made the cars and the wars
necessary, the droughts and hurricanes.

"Nimbawaadaan Akiing / I Dream a World" by Margaret Noodin

Nimbawaadaan akiing

I dream a world

atemagag biinaagami

of clean water

gete-mitigoog

ancient trees

gaye gwekaanimad

and changing winds.

"Dead Stars" by Ada Limón

What if we stood up with our synapses and flesh and said, No.

     No, to the rising tides.

Stood for the many mute mouths of the sea, of the land?

What would happen if we used our bodies to bargain

for the safety of others, for earth,

                 if we declared a clean night, if we stopped being terrified,

"Mending Mittens" by Larry Schug

Blessed be those who have laced together

the splits at the seams of this world,

repaired its threads of twisted waters.

Blessed be those who stitch together

the animals and the land,

repair the rends in the fabric

of wolf and forest,

of whale and ocean,

of condor and sky.

Blessed be those who are forever fixing

the tear between people and the rest of life

"Testimony" by Rebecca Baggett

I want to say, like Neruda,

that I am waiting for

"a great and common tenderness,"

that I still believe

we are capable of attention,

that anyone who notices the world

must want to save it.

The Quotidian: Poems Celebrating the Everyday, the Ordinary

The roots of this collection may go back to my early childhood. We owned a copy of "A Child's Garden of Verses" by Robert Louis Stevenson. I can still envision the Little Golden Book, with its gilt-edged binding and a painting of a small golden-haired girl with a crown of flowers opening the gate in a white picket fence.

When I go back to it now I find the verses incredibly preachy, but one very short piece captures some of the feeling in the poems collected here (setting aside for one moment the many, many tragedies created by monarchies). In its entirety, it reads:

"Happy Thought" by Robert Louis Stevenson

The world is so full of a number of things,
I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings.

According to Merriam-Webster (whose social media game is ON POINT so they're my go-to dictionary), the word "quotidian" means occurring every day; belonging to each day; commonplace, ordinary. And yet the things around us, the world around us that we might think of as commonplace are simply and actually amazing! Everything from the way a seed grows into a whole entire tree to the many, many people and processes it took for me to have coffee in my cup is incredible, when you stop and think about it for a moment.

Some time ago I read The Art of Noticing, by Rob Walker (Bookshop.org affiliate link*), and I read his newsletter. The book and his columns provide suggestions for how you might apply the power and energy of simply noticing to add mindfulness and insight to your days. As one example, standing in one spot waiting for my sweetie to come out of the hardware store I simply looked around and noted every instance of the color blue I could find (clicking on the link takes you to my first tweet in a whole thread.) 

Blue. pic.twitter.com/D7vrSFBZMo

— Barb Chamberlain (@BarbChamberlain) May 7, 2022

What is both ordinary and amazing in your world? These poems may point you to some of the incredibleness that surrounds and supports your life. 

"Here" by Wislawa Szymborska

I don’t know about other places,
but here on Earth there’s quite a lot of everything.
Here chairs are made and sadness,
scissors, violins, tenderness, transistors,
water dams, jokes, teacups.

"Tribute Poem" by Anne Higgins

for corkscrews,
corkscrew call of
yellowing lustful goldfinches,
butter,
opposable thumbs,

"Credo" by Donna Hilbert

I believe in the Tuesdays
and Wednesdays of life,
the tuna sandwich lunches
and TV after dinner.

"I Believe Nothing" by Katherine Raine

I believe nothing—what need
Surrounded as I am with marvels of what is,
This familiar room, books, shabby carpet on the floor,
Autumn yellow jasmine, chrysanthemums, my mother's flower,
Earth-scent of memories, daily miracles,

"But You Thought You Knew What a Sign Looked Like" by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

We are blessed
by marvels wearing ordinary clothes—
how easily we’re fooled by simple dress—
Oranges. Water. Leaves. Bread. Crows.

"Otherwise" by Jane Hirshfeld

I slept in a bed
in a room with paintings
on the walls, and
planned another day
just like this day.

"The Letter from Home" by Nancyrose Houston

There was a bed, it was
soft, there was a blanket, it was warm, there were dreams,
they were good. 

"Welcome Morning" by Anne Sexton

in the outcry from the kettle
that heats my coffee
each morning,
in the spoon and the chair
that cry “hello there, Anne”
each morning,

"Daily" by Naomi Shihab Nye

This page I type and retype
This table I dust till the scarred wood shines
This bundle of clothes I wash and hang and wash again
like flags we share, a country so close
no one needs to name it

"Ode to Things" by Pablo Neruda

I love
all things,
not only the
grand,
but also the infinite-
ly
small:
the thimble,
spurs,
dishes,
vases.

"The Patience of Ordinary Things" by Pat Schneider

And the lovely repetition of stairs.
And what is more generous than a window?

"Miracle Fair" by Wislawa Szymborska

First among equal miracles:
cows are cows.

Second to none:
just this orchard
from just that seed.

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