Recent Poems of Grief and Love and Nature

Found several maybe relevant poems recently published in the New Yorker like this one by Sara Arvio "Wood". See my earlier post: A Boy Once Told Me.

And this one "Last Day on Planet Earth". This one reminds me of the art I run into a lot among friends in the San Francisco art scene. (eg. Eric Davis' great How I survived the Apocalypse: the Burning Man Opera; my friend Nate's memoir Packing for the Apocalypse.) Apocalypse has been a fascinating humanity it seems since the beginning of history, so I hadn't really taken the recent fad seriously until recently when I've felt its gravity all around me and in a way that deeply bothers me. Will my students, my own boys, my nieces and nephews have children with gadgets implanted in their heads? Will they feel some end more poignantly than we fantasize about now? O.K. so I guess somebody should be asking these questions and romanticizing lonely but liberating space travel. But I'd rather not.

And there's Merwin who thankfully for decades has been writing amazingly beautiful poetry about nature and time and love and memory and self: "Young Man Picking Flowers". My idea for a poem below is in deference to Merwin.

Somewhere between nostalgia and love
and grief and anger and
revision and children
and little hands
and little first words
(Hello Mama)
there are warm days and
warm winter nights
and tomatoes in December
and roses in January
and so many pretty things
flourishing, blossoming, dangling
hypnotically.