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.

Flying High with Bird Poems

I wouldn't describe myself as a birder. That to me implies owning high-end binoculars, planning vacations around migratory patterns, trying to find that one bird that eludes me with a persistence that baffles other humans. Having recently watched "The Residence" with the wonderful Uzo Aduba as a consulting detective who applies the skills of a passionate birder to her examination of human nature, I know I'm not that.

I don't have to be a birder to enjoy looking for, listening to, watching birds. (Just as you don't have to be a self-described "avid cyclist" to enjoy a bike ride!) I've always thought they were amazing and beautiful, always looked up when I caught a glimpse of winged shapes overhead out of the corner of my eye. Seems to me there's something in all of us that wants to soar.

In 2013 living for a while in a house that had a tree right outside the front window led to purchase of a bird feeder and a bird book for identification. Sweet Hubs entered fully into this new activity, looking up birds when he saw them and marking the date seen. We were both thrilled a while back to spot a kingfisher in the Budd Bay inlet we walk along as we head toward downtown and the farmers' market, love seeing a blue heron standing in the shallows, a patient fisher. 

He started calling crows my "corvid escorts" at some point because of course we see them on every walk. I do love crows, and pre-COVID I had the incredible opportunity to go on a trip that included time in London so I saw the ravens at the Tower of London. 

Our yard has a bird bath, a hummingbird feeder on the back deck, multiple feeders in the tree outside my home office window (yay, another house with a tree right there to let me watch them swoop and land!). As I record delights in my journal I often have notes about bird songs or sightings. Just the other day a Steller's jay and a robin had some sort of altercation on the wing just as I stepped out our front door, flashing across our little cul-de-sac with a lot of sound and fury. The jay landed in the neighbor's hawthorn tree while the robin swooped in to sit in the middle of the road. I think the robin won.

The book Bright Wings: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems about Birds* crossed my path after I had started my own collection. Edited by Billy Collins and illustrated by David Allen Sibley, it's a beautiful work. Highly recommend and I don't think I have many duplicates here. Later I found The Poets Guide to the Birds*, edited by Judith Kitchen and Ted Kooser, another wonderful collection that you're most likely to find from a bookseller who sells used books. My poetry book collection grows and grows alongside my appreciation of our fine feathered friends.

"Crows"
Mary Oliver

Crow is crow, you say. What else is there to say?

"Canto for the Chestnut-Eared Laughingthrush"
Hai-Dang Phan

Hidden somewhere in that mystery must be
Our very own Chestnut-eared Laughingthrush.
Garrulax konkakinhensis was our day’s journey
And query, who appeared in our dreams calling.

"Fifty Robins"
Amber Coverdale Sumrall

The first robins of winter descend like drunken paratroopers;
I imagine they’ve been feasting on fermented pyracantha berries

the way they drop, woozy and chortling, to the ground,
gleefully snagging drowning worms from the saturated soil.

"Evening Walk, Mid-March"
Sarah Busse

But the sky is full of occasion—robins.

Robins invisible
in the still-bare trees, twittering, chirruping
cheerily around the entire suburban block.

It couldn't be called song,
that curiously bubbling chatter-sound they make,
waxy and bibulous as a pubhouse or bridal shower.

"Baby Wrens"
Thomas R. Smith

I am a student of wrens.
When the mother bird returns
to her brood, beak squirming
with winged breakfast, a shrill
clamor rises like jingling
from tiny, high-pitched bells.

"Sixty Years Later I Notice, Inside A Flock Of Blackbirds,"
David Allan Evans

as the flock suddenly
rises from November stubble,

hovers a few seconds,
closing, opening,

"Great Blue Heron"
T. Allan Broughton

.... I’ve seen
his slate blue feathers lift him as dangling legs
fold back, I’ve seen him fly through the dying sun
and out again, entering night, entering my own sleep.

"Once" by Tara Bray

.... The heron stood
stone-still on my spot when I returned.
And then, his wings burst open, lifting the steel-
blue rhythm of his body into flight.

"Our Heron" 
Willam Olsen

Then a heron. Pulled forward by fish, the baiting saint of the shallows. 

"Not Knowing Why" 
Ann Struthers

Adolescent white pelicans squawk, rustle, flap their wings,
lift off in a ragged spiral at imaginary danger.
What danger on this island in the middle
of Marble Lake? They’re off to feel
the lift of wind under their iridescent wings,
because they were born to fly,

"Poor Patriarch" 
Susie Patlove

The rooster pushes his head
high among the hens, trying to be
what he feels he must be, here
in the confines of domesticity.
Before the tall legs of my presence,
he bristles and shakes his ruby comb.

"The Birds" 
Linda Pastan

as they swoop and gather—
the shadow of wings
falls over the heart.
When they rustle among
the empty branches, the trees
must think their lost leaves
have come back.

"Praise Them"
Li-Young Lee

The birds don’t alter space.
They reveal it. The sky
never fills with any
leftover flying. They leave
nothing to trace. 

"Waking Up"
David Allan Evans

We wake up again to the sound
of those same birds just

outside our window. I can’t
name them, wouldn’t need to

if I could, 

* That's a Bookshop affiliate link just in case you don't have a local bookstore or library. Any commission I receive from book sales will be donated to organizations working for safer, human-friendly streets and transportation equity. Making it safer for people to walk and bike is good for the birds, too, since those are the cleanest and greenest forms of transportation.

Root, Trunk, Branch, Leaf: Poems about Trees

Trees amaze me. Their shapes, size, leaves, colors for starters. Then there's all they do that supports life on earth, like make oxygen we need to live. Their underground communication networks, the beneficial phyto-somethings they emit. Truly a source of awe and wonder. 

I have fond memories of the trees of my childhood. I grew up outside Lewiston, Idaho, in a home surrounded by 8 acres or so of pasture, garden, and lawn dotted with lilacs, a big snowball bush, my mom's roses, and trees. The hawthorn protected a gate into the big pasture, the giant willow held a tire swing, the crabapple supported a hammock my middle brother brought back from one of his Latin American journeys, the honey locust the "Freehouse Treehouse" my brothers built for my younger sister and me. We'd haul a bag of books and snacks up the boards nailed to the tree to form a ladder and read for hours surrounded by the buzzing of bees drawn to the sweetness of the cream and yellow blossoms.

Later we lived in the Spokane Valley on a lot with sparse Ponderosa pines. Sparse was good, it turned out, when Firestorm '91 swept across the valley and got stopped just across the street from my parents' home. The fire was stopped there in part by the green space created by their lawn with trees far enough apart that the flames didn't jump the road and keep going, and by my dad getting on the roof with a hose and wetting it down repeatedly.

Since then I've lived with more Ponderosa pine than any other tree, I think. I'm now in a neighborhood with trees all around but can happily report I have no pine needles to rake. When we bought the house it had a couple of cherry plum trees, no doubt chosen by the developer 25 years ago for their dark red leaves, and a maple in a back corner. We've added a nectaplum (a newer hybrid of nectarine and plum), hazelnut, almond, and paper-white birch to add food, shade, and beauty to the landscape. The food hasn't appeared yet but it will someday. Trees teach patience.

I really appreciate trees when I'm on a long walk or bike ride on a hot day, and hot days are increasingly common in the Anthropocene epoch, with climate changes caused and accelerated by human actions. Our actions can include planting a tree, though, to add to the lungs of the planet. Tree cover makes a difference for shade, for habitat, for personal and community health and happiness. You can find out what kind of tree cover your hometown has in this Washington Post article. The Olympia-Lacey area has an estimated 36.8% tree cover, over 4% higher than the average in comparable cities, so yay for that!

I'm fortunate to live close to Squaxin Park in Olympia. I can take a lunchtime walk in a forest that isn't old-growth (over 160 years old as defined in western Washington, like the rain forest around Lake Quinault where I walked in February), but it's legacy forest. 

A legacy forest was lightly logged about a century ago; left undisturbed since then, it's had time to regenerate complex ecosystems. You might think of legacy forests as the old-growth forests of the future, or at least they will be if we don't log them again. (More on legacy forests)

A while back I went to a talk on trees given through Olympia Parks and Recreation. Julia Ratner, a member of Friends of Trees (a local group working to conserve forest lands), shared recordings she made of the electrical impulses of trees translated into musical tones with an Italian-made device called Plants Play. You can listen to a Sitka spruce left isolated by a clearcut and a cedar in an undisturbed forest at the Friends of Trees link. 

As I walk I hear squirrels scolding me, an insect buzzing past, leaves rustling, wind in the trees high above sometimes sounding almost like the ocean, my feet making a gentle pad-pad-pad sound on the trail, water trickling if it has rained recently (and this is in western Washington, so that's likely). I don't hear the communication of the trees but I know it's there.

I've told my family that when I've died I'd like my compost or ashes or what-have-you to be buried under a Susie Tree in a park or reforestation project somewhere. This will give them a place to visit, if they like, that does more for the world than a slab of stone that requires mining and transportation. It's also a nice callback to the first full-time executive director of what was then the Bicycle Alliance of Washington. Susie Stephens also came from Spokane and loved trees. After I became the executive director at what we later renamed Washington Bikes I learned a bit of her history from her mother, Nancy MacKerrow. "Tree Cemetery" by Wu Sheng captures this idea perfectly.

As with all my collections of poetry I've selected a few lines, not necessarily the opening ones. To read the complete poem follow the link.

"When I Am Among the Trees"
Mary Oliver

And they call again, "It's simple," they say,
"and you too have come
into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
with light, and to shine."

"Elegy for a Walnut Tree"
W.S. Merwin

and still when spring climbed toward summer

you opened once more the curled sleeping fingers

of newborn leaves as though nothing had happened


"Tree"
Jane Hirshfeld

It is foolish
to let a young redwood
grow next to a house.

"Trees" 
Howard Nemerov

To be a giant and keep quiet about it,
To stay in one's own place;
To stand for the constant presence of process
And always to seem the same;

"Planting a Dogwood" 
Roy Scheele

For when we plant a tree, two trees take root:
the one that lifts its leaves into the air,
and the inverted one that cleaves the soil
to find the runnel’s sweet, dull silver trace
and spreads not up but down, each drop a leaf
in the eternal blackness of that sky.

"Crab Apple Trees"
Larry Schug

I’m tempted to say these trees belong to me,
take credit for blossoms that gather sunrise
like stained glass windows,
because eighteen springs ago
I dug holes for a couple of scrawny seedlings,

"The Bare Arms of Trees"
John Tagliabue

The bare arms of the trees are immovable, without the play of leaves,
     without the sound of wind;
I think of the unseen love and the unknown thoughts that exist
      between tree and tree,
As I pass these things in the evening, as I walk.

"Sequoia Sempervirens"
Tamara Madison

Some of these trees have survived
lightning strikes and forest fires
Some of these trees house creatures
of the forest floor in burned-out caves
at the base of their ruddy trunks

"Honey Locust"
Mary Oliver

Each white blossom
on a dangle of white flowers holds one green seed-
a new life. Also each blossom on a dangle of flower
holds a flask
of fragrance called heave, which is never sealed.
The bees circle the tree and dive into it. They are crazy
with gratitude. They are working like farmers. 

"April Prayer"
Stuart Kestenbaum

Just before the green begins there is the hint of green
a blush of color, and the red buds thicken
the ends of the maple’s branches and everything
is poised before the start of a new world,
which is really the same world

"Tree Cemetery"
Wu Sheng

Plant a tree in place of a grave
Plant a patch of trees in place of a cemetery
Put a flowerbed around each tree
Lay the ashes of the deceased to rest by the stump

"What's Really at Stake"
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

I like pulling the tree-sweet air
into my lungs, like thinking of how
even now I, too, am becoming
more tree, as if my shadow side, too,
might soon grow moss. As if I, too,
might begin to grow roots right here

March Delights

The second day of March gifted me with the perfect poem to capture what seeking out delights offers in each day.

"The Good News" by Thich Nhat Hanh comes my way courtesy of reading poetry every morning. At some point in the early COVID era I found A Year of Being Here, a site at which Phyllis Cole-Dai posted a poem that supports mindfulness every day for three years. Ever since I've been reading each day's poems. It turns these poems into old friends, this one reminding me that I can choose to greet a dandelion as a delight:

From "The Good News":

"The dandelion is there by the sidewalk,
smiling its wondrous smile,
singing the song of eternity."

And then there's the poem by his student Marci Thurston-Shaine, "More Good News".

"You and I are flowers of a tenacious family.
Breathe slowly and deeply,
free of previous occupation."

These poems go so well with March, when dandelions are popping out in our lawn to provide some early spring food for the bees. Such an ordinary, everyday flower, treated with scorn by lawnkeepers who attack it for daring to interrupt their smooth swards. And yet they keep coming back, persistent, blooming.

Other early flowers provide more obvious delights. The cherry plum tree I see looking out of my office window is popping with pink, blooming at a rate I almost feel I should be able to see in real time. In the back yard we have a tree dubbed the "Seuss tree." Its slender, lithe branches rise up and then droop over. We keep the bottom trimmed straight off so the branches don't drag on the small deck. This gives the tree the overall effect of a bowl-shaped haircut, resembling many of Dr. Seuss's classic characters. That tree is popping tiny white flowers, somewhat behind the cherry plum. Spring flowers bring so much delight, just waiting to be noticed.

Each morning I visit sites that bring me new poems, some of which find their way into my themed poetry collections. I'm a bit surprised that I missed "The Good News" when I compiled poems that celebrate the everyday and ordinary in life.

The site grateful.org also makes up part of my morning routine. The question of the day sometimes relates to poems I've already read that morning, or reminds me of a poem I've read in the past. The question always inspires attention, notice, appreciation—all essential elements of finding delights.

One day in March the day's question asked, "When I shift my focus to the extraordinary nature of the ordinary, what do I notice?" My response:

Simply paying attention shifts focus. Thinking of how things came to be, and came to me, shifts focus outward, to a broader awareness and appreciation. So many, many steps, coincidences, choices, decisions, happenstances if that’s a word, natural processes, sunlight and air all aligned and here I am, here we are, here is my afghan and my sofa and the coffee in my cup and the cup and the table. Extraordinary and ordinary, all at once.

Each day's delights are both ordinary and extraordinary.

Related Reading

• A Year of Poems: March
• Walking in March: Of Woods and Work
• Reruns: March Posts Worth Revisiting
• January Delights
• February Delights
• Bike Delights