“It is the fate of poetry to fall in love with the world, in spite of history,” wrote Derek Walcott. The challenges of recent history touch this year’s Top Five Poems of the Week, from overcoming the isolation of pandemic lockdown, to a fantasy of escaping a diminished present via time travel to a more tender past, to a woman’s sorrowing anger over nature’s and a man’s indifference, then a Nigerian song of spirit and mortality, and finally an empathetic, humorous poem in couplets about the ironies of burdens and responsibilites—all in all, five poems with love for our sorrowful, astonishing, imperfect, generous world.
Congratulations to the winners.
Amanda Gunn
Return
Warm strange winter-dry hands reached for me.
Cate Lycurgus
More Tenderer
I want to go back a decade, if only to jazz it up.
Cecily Parks
Motherhood
Motherhood would be for me a country of rage.
Nome Emeka Patrick
Plot with the Horses in My Heart/with the Birds in My Mouth
Sometimes I want to hear the giggles of a child in the lightning.
Nikki Wallschlaeger
Horse Poem
I live in a house known to the locals as a “witch house.”
