On Earth, everyone loved butterflies,
but I trusted the caterpillars more.
I trusted the ones who knew

they were not done growing.
On Earth, I was a work in progress,
was comforted in knowing

that I had a million mistakes still in me
to learn from. I changed my mind
more often than I changed my socks,

and whenever I was criticized
for mismatched thoughts, I’d say,
who wants to be today

who they were yesterday?
Becoming was how I prayed.
But here—I am past the finish line:

I have a heart of gold,
and I never have to dig for it.
I couldn’t do anything wrong if I tried,
and trust me, I try, but

I get hot-headed, and my rage
toasts the marshmallow on an angel’s
celestial s’mores. I lose my temper and find it
in the halo lost-and found box.

Lies won’t let me tell them.
they handed me a sticker
that said My Name Is and I wrote
Everyone by accident. I can’t remember

what selfishness is. Yesterday I said
something angry about an ex, and a quarter
of my tastebuds jumped off my tongue.
I’ve known nothing

of bitterness since.
Right before I died, I thought,
In the afterlife, I’ll apply for a job
at a mistake factory. They’ll be awed

by my resume. If anything, I’m overqualified.
But there’s no place where they make 
mistakes here. Everyone is flawless.
Everyone’s blunders are photoshopped

right off their lives before 
they even happen. Is this heaven 
or hell? I can’t tell. I looked 
that famous carpenter up

in the phone book, but his number
wasn’t listed, and I need to ask him
where to find the wood to build
some missteps. I’m not about to spend

eternity burning in the lie that holy 
and perfect are the same thing.
Do you understand?

A promised land
is not a promised land
if I can’t keep learning

~ from You Better Be Lightning (Button Poetry, 2021)

“When you are trapped in a nightmare, 
your motivation to awaken 
will be so much greater 
than that if someone caught up 
in a relatively pleasant dream.”
— Eckhart Tolle

When I realized the storm was inevitable, 
I made it my medicine. 
Took two snowflakes on the tongue
in the morning, two snowflakes
on the tongue by noon.
There were no side effects.
Only sound effects. Reverb added
to my life span, an echo that asked—
What part of your life‘s record is skipping?
Which wound is on repeat?
Have you done everything you can?
to break out of that groove?

By nighttime I was intimate with
the difference between tying my laces, 
and tuning the string section of my shoes,
made a symphony of walking away from
everything that did not want my life to sing.

Felt a love for myself, so consistent
metronomes tried to copyright my heartbeat.

Finally understood I am the conductor of my own life, 
and will be even after I die.

I, like the trees, will decide what I become:
Porch swing? Church pew? An envelope
that must be licked to be closed?
Kinky choice, but I didn’t close.

I opened and opened until I could imagine 
the pain was the sensation of my spirit 
not breaking, that my mind was a parachute 
that could always open in time,
That I could wear my heart 
on my sleeve and never grow 
out of that shirt.

That every falling leaf is a tiny kite
with a string, too small to see, held 
by the part of me in charge 
of making beauty 
out of grief.

~ from You Better Be Lightning (Button Poetry, 2021)

1.
Something came up
out of the dark.
It wasn't anything I had ever seen before.
It wasn't an animal
   or a flower,
unless it was both.

Something came up out of the water,
   a head the size of a cat
but muddy and without ears.
I don't know what God is.
I don't know what death is.

But I believe they have between them
   some fervent and necessary arrangement.

2.
Sometimes
melancholy leaves me breathless.

3.
Later I was in a field of full of sunflowers.
I was feeling the heat of midsummer. 
I was thinking of the sweet, electric
   drowse of creation,

when it began to break.
In the west, clouds gathered.
Thunderheads.
In an hour the sky was filled with them.

In an hour the sky was filled
   with the sweetness of rain and the blast of lightning.
Followed by the deep bells of thunder.

Water from the heavens! Electricity from the source!
Both of them mad to create something!

The lightning brighter than any flower.
The thunder without a drowsy bone in its body.

4.
Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.

5.
Two or three times in my life I discovered love.
Each time it seemed to solve everything.
Each time it solved a great many things
   but not everything.
Yet left me as grateful as if it had indeed, and
thoroughly, solved everything.

6.
God, rest in my heart
and fortify me,
take away my hunger for answers,
let the hours play upon my body
like the hands of my beloved.
Let the cathead appear again-
the smallest of your mysteries,
some wild cousin of my own blood probably-
some cousin of my own wild blood probably,
in the black dinner-bowl of the pond.

7.
Death waits for me, I know it, around
   one corner or another.
This doesn't amuse me.
Neither does it frighten me.

After the rain, I went back into the field of sunflowers.
It was cool, and I was anything but drowsy.
I walked slowly, and listened
to the crazy roots, in the drenched earth, laughing and growing.

~  from Red Bird (Beacon Press, 2008)

Summer late evening	

my friend the sunset 

to surprise me

took the most interesting streets

Late he was

Longer than ever before

~ from Dunce (Wave Books, 2020)

Because right now, there is 		someone

out there with

a wound 				in the exact shape
					of your words.
~ from The Second O of Sorrow (BOA Editions, 2018)

I come from
a people who pray five times a day
and make tea. I admire the way they do
both. How they drop to the ground
wherever they are. Drop
pine nuts and mint sprigs in a glass.
I think to care for the self
is a kind of prayer. It is a gesture
of devotion toward what is not always beloved
or believed. I do not always believe
in myself, or love myself, I am sure
there are times I am bad or gone
or lying. In another’s mouth, tea often means gossip,
but sometimes means truth. Despite
the trope, in my experience my people do not lie
for pleasure, or when they should,
even when it might be a gesture
of kindness. But they are kind. If you were
to visit, a woman would bring you
a tray of tea. At any time of day.
My people love tea so much
it was once considered a sickness. Their colonizers
tried, as with any joy, to snuff it out. They feared a love
so strong one might sell or kill their other
loves for leaves and sugar. Teaism
sounds like a kind of faith
I’d buy into, a god I wouldn’t fear. I think now I truly believe
I wouldn’t kill anyone for love,
not even myself—most days
I can barely get out of bed. So I make tea.
I stand at the window while I wait.
My feet are cold and the radio plays its little sounds.
I do the small thing I know how to do
to care for myself. I am trying to notice joy,
which means survive. I do this all day, and then the next.   
~ from The Missouri Review, Mar 22, 2020

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.   

I am saying thank you, yes, to this burgeoning spring 
and to the cold wind of its changes. Gratitude comes easy 
after a hot shower, when my loosened muscles work, 
when eyes and mind begin to clear and even unruly hair combs into place.   

Dialogue with the invisible can go on every minute, 
and with surprising gaiety I am saying thank you as I remember 
who I am, a woman learning to praise 
something as small as dandelion petals floating on the 
steaming surface of this bowl of vegetable soup, my 
happy, savoring tongue.

~ The Sun Magazine,  May 2009

Not every man knows what he shall sing at the end,
Watching the pier as the ship sails away, or what it will seem like
When he’s held by the sea’s roar, motionless, there at the end,
Or what he shall hope for once it is clear that he’ll never go back.

When the time has passed to prune the rose or caress the cat,
When the sunset torching the lawn and the full moon icing it down
No longer appear, not every man knows what he’ll discover instead.
When the weight of the past leans against nothing, and the sky

Is no more than remembered light, and the stories of cirrus
And cumulus come to a close, and all the birds are suspended in flight,
Not every man knows what is waiting for him, or what he shall sing
When the ship he is on slips into darkness, there at the end.

~ from The Continuous Life: Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 1990)

I wish I could say I was the kind of child
who watched the moon from her window,
would turn toward it and wonder.
I never wondered. I read. Dark signs
that crawled toward the edge of the page.
It took me years to grow a heart
from paper and glue. All I had
was a flashlight, bright as the moon,
a white hole blazing beneath the sheets.

~ from Facts About the Moon. © W.W. Norton & Company, 2006

Just when you seem to yourself
nothing but a flimsy web
of questions, you are given
the questions of others to hold
in the emptiness of your hands,
songbird eggs that can still hatch
if you keep them warm,
butterflies opening and closing themselves
in your cupped palms, trusting you not to injure
their scintillant fur, their dust.
You are given the questions of others
as if they were answers
to all you ask. Yes, perhaps
this gift is your answer.

~ from Sands of the Well (New Directions, 1998)

translated by Batool Abu Akleen (Palestinian poet and translator) 

For 300 days, I was accompanied by Anya—my camera, and my only good friend who knew how to catch things, how to take the photos I wanted. For 300 days, my brothers and I were being killed in this massacre. Blood has been flowing over the ground, and I’ve become afraid of the moment when my brothers’ blood will reach me, will stain me. For 300 days, we’ve been seeing only black and red, smelling the scent of death, eating bitter apples, touching only corpses.

It’s the first time I have experienced such a massive loss. I have lost 11 members of my family, the dearest to my heart. Still, nothing can stop me. I roam the streets every day without any master plan. I just want the world to see what I see. I am taking photos to archive this period of my life. I am taking photos of this history which my sons might hear of, or might not.

We, we’re dying here every day in many colors and shapes. I die a thousand times when I see a child suffer; I splinter, I turn into ashes. It hurts me, what we’ve become. This nonsense hurts me, and this monster that eats us every day: it hurts.

Every day when I leave, I see my mother waving goodbye, but I don’t turn around. I don’t want to see those eyes. I don’t want all this sorrow for my mother, but what is there in this city? It is only death.

On mentioning death, the inevitable death:

If I must die, I want a resonant death. I want to be neither a newsflash, nor a number within a group. I want a death heard by the whole world, an impact imprinted forever, and everlasting photos that won’t be buried by time or place.

~ from: https://arablit.org/2025/04/20/a-resonant-death-poems-reflections-by-fatima-hassouna

On this they were in agreement:
everything that can happen between two people
happens after a while

or has been thought about so hard
there's almost no difference
between desire and deed.

Each day they stayed together, therefore,
was a day of forgiveness, tacit,
no reason to say the words.

It was easy to forgive, so much harder
to be forgiven. The forgiven had to agree
to eat dust in the house of the noble

and both knew this couldn't go on for long.
The forgiven would need to rise;
the forgiver need to remember the cruelty

in being correct.
Which is why, except in crises,
they spoke about the garden,

what happened at work,
the little ailments and aches
their familiar bodies separately felt.

~ from New and Selected Poems 1974-1994 (W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. 1994)

is turning me off. so i take a walk.
plums fall from trees and protest 
& i can’t see the colour green 
anymore & just last night yo  
just last night god went SPLAT 
on my window like a fluttery lick
spittle & told me all love starts 
in a garden. what am i supposed to do
with that?  another friend goes. gone 
enough. almost never here. those facetimes
inside me out all year, wishing I could see you
in the hospital.  life breaks who doesn’t cry
eventually. one more grave in the middle
of all that green. prayers tangle in my pockets 
like earphone wire. i think about the best way
to maneuver my mask & eat, then give up.
i think about the best way to sneak 
into the hospital.  what about the body 
& everything it can’t keep? i’m so over
the garden. i stood at its knee, dressed in 
leaves, begging for fruit. learned the only 
predator in paradise is me. no eating or being eaten.
bony limbs, broken lungs & growing more 
unknown.

~ from Ploughshares, Vol 48, Number 1, Spring 2022

tThen in the writers’ wood, every bird with a name in the world crowded the leafless trees took its turn to whistle or croak. An owl grieved in an oak. A magpie mocked. A rook cursed from a sycamore. The cormorant spoke: Stinking seas below ill winds. Nothing swims. A vast plastic soup, thousand miles wide as long, of petroleum crap. A bird of paradise wept in a willow. The jewel of a hummingbird shrilled on the air. A stork shawled itself like a widow. The gull said: Where coral was red, now white, dead under stunned waters. The language of fish cut out at the root. Mute oceans. Oil like a gag on the Gulf of Mexico... A woodpecker heckled. A vulture picked at its own breast. Thrice from the cockerel, as ever. The macaw squawked: Nouns I know– Rain. Forest. Fire. Ash. Chainsaw. Cattle. Cocaine. Cash. Squatters. Ranchers. Loggers. Looters. Barons. Shooters. A hawk swore. A nightingale opened its throat in a garbled quote. A worm turned in the blackbird’s beak. This from the crane: What I saw – slow thaw in permafrost broken terrain of mud and lakes peat broth seepage melt methane breath. A bat hung like a suicide. Only a rasp of wings from the raven. A heron was stone a robin blood in the written wood. So snow and darkness slowly fell the eagle, history, in silhouette, with the golden plover, and the albatross telling of Arctic ice as the cold, hard moon calved from the earth. ~ from Earth Prayers, Encounters in Poetry with the Natural World (Picador, 2024)

translated by Joanna Trzeciak

Out of every hundred people

those who always know better:
fifty-two.

Unsure of every step:
nearly all the rest.

Ready to help,
as long as it doesn’t take long:
forty-nine.

Always good,
because they cannot be otherwise:
four—well, maybe five.

Able to admire without envy:
eighteen.

Led to error
by youth (which passes):
sixty, plus or minus.

Those not to be messed with:
forty and four.

Living in constant fear
of someone or something:
seventy-seven.

Capable of happiness:
twenty-some-odd at most.

Harmless alone,
turning savage in crowds:
more than half, for sure.

Cruel
when forced by circumstances:
it’s better not to know
not even approximately.

Wise in hindsight:
not many more
than wise in foresight.

Getting nothing out of life but things:
thirty
(although I would like to be wrong).

Doubled over in pain,
without a flashlight in the dark:
eighty-three,
sooner or later.

Those who are just:
quite a few at thirty-five.

But if it takes effort to understand:
three.

Worthy of empathy:
ninety-nine.

Mortal:
one hundred out of one hundred—
a figure that has never varied yet.              

~from Miracle Fair (W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2002)

That you were born
and you will die.

That you will sometimes love enough
and sometimes not.

That you will lie
if only to yourself.

That you will get tired.

That you will learn most from the situations
you did not choose

That there will be some things that move you
more than you can say.

That you will live
that you must be loved.

That you will avoid questions most urgently in need of
your attention.

That you began as the fusion of a sperm and an egg
of two people who once were strangers
and may well still be.

That life isn’t fair.
That life is sometimes good
and sometimes better than good.

That life is often not so good.

That life is real
and if you can survive it, well,
survive it well
with love
and art
and meaning given
where meaning’s scarce.

That you will learn to live with regret.
That you will learn to live with respect.

That the structures that constrict you
may not be permanently constraining.

That you will probably be okay.

That you must accept change
before you die
but you will die anyway.           

So you might as well live    
and you might as well love.      
You might as well love.     
You might as well love.

~ From Sorry For Your Troubles (Canterbury Press Norwich, 2013)

I wonder,
Will it all click into place?
I feel it might.
I had a glimpse
That things could all come right.
I'd wake up
On a sunny, slightly roostered morn
And wouldn't realise at first;
The rightness would take time to dawn.
And gradually
the thing would start to gleam;
This worried life I'd had,
This awful world, this painful mess –
It was, in fact, a kind of dream.
The penny would just drop
Into my hand,
The penny that I'd lost so long ago,
And all the peace withheld and blocked from me
Would start to flow.
The gentle hum, the gold and silver light
Would all resume;
The fairies and the pixies,
The particles of dust
Caught in the sunlight in my room.
I'd pick up
Where I'd been so rudely interrupted;
I'd have it back again for keeps,
My dog, my brilliant grasp of life,
My backyard and my paddocks full of time,
The world all glad around me,
My rightful place,
My joyous leaps.

~ from Poems 1972-2002, Melbourne, Penguin (Viking) 2003

I wonder,
Will it all click into place?
I feel it might.
I had a glimpse
That things could all come right.
I'd wake up
On a sunny, slightly roostered morn
And wouldn't realise at first;
The rightness would take time to dawn.
And gradually
the thing would start to gleam;
This worried life I'd had,
This awful world, this painful mess –
It was, in fact, a kind of dream.
The penny would just drop
Into my hand,
The penny that I'd lost so long ago,
And all the peace withheld and blocked from me
Would start to flow.
The gentle hum, the gold and silver light
Would all resume;
The fairies and the pixies,
The particles of dust
Caught in the sunlight in my room.
I'd pick up
Where I'd been so rudely interrupted;
I'd have it back again for keeps,
My dog, my brilliant grasp of life,
My backyard and my paddocks full of time,
The world all glad around me,
My rightful place,
My joyous leaps.

~ from Poems 1972-2002, Melbourne, Penguin (Viking) 2003

I wonder,
Will it all click into place?
I feel it might.
I had a glimpse
That things could all come right.
I'd wake up
On a sunny, slightly roostered morn
And wouldn't realise at first;
The rightness would take time to dawn.
And gradually
the thing would start to gleam;
This worried life I'd had,
This awful world, this painful mess –
It was, in fact, a kind of dream.
The penny would just drop
Into my hand,
The penny that I'd lost so long ago,
And all the peace withheld and blocked from me
Would start to flow.
The gentle hum, the gold and silver light
Would all resume;
The fairies and the pixies,
The particles of dust
Caught in the sunlight in my room.
I'd pick up
Where I'd been so rudely interrupted;
I'd have it back again for keeps,
My dog, my brilliant grasp of life,
My backyard and my paddocks full of time,
The world all glad around me,
My rightful place,
My joyous leaps.

~ from Poems 1972-2002, Melbourne, Penguin (Viking) 2003

I wonder,
Will it all click into place?
I feel it might.
I had a glimpse
That things could all come right.
I'd wake up
On a sunny, slightly roostered morn
And wouldn't realise at first;
The rightness would take time to dawn.
And gradually
the thing would start to gleam;
This worried life I'd had,
This awful world, this painful mess –
It was, in fact, a kind of dream.
The penny would just drop
Into my hand,
The penny that I'd lost so long ago,
And all the peace withheld and blocked from me
Would start to flow.
The gentle hum, the gold and silver light
Would all resume;
The fairies and the pixies,
The particles of dust
Caught in the sunlight in my room.
I'd pick up
Where I'd been so rudely interrupted;
I'd have it back again for keeps,
My dog, my brilliant grasp of life,
My backyard and my paddocks full of time,
The world all glad around me,
My rightful place,
My joyous leaps.

~ from Poems 1972-2002, Melbourne, Penguin (Viking) 2003