Tell me is there anything lovelier,
Anything more quieting
Than the green of little blades of grass
And the green of little leaves?
Is not each leaf a cool green hand,
Is not each blade of grass a mothering green finger,
Hushing the heart that beats and beats and beats?
Greenness, Angelina Weld Grimké
In the very early morning
Long before Dawn time
I lay down in the paddock
And listened to the cold song of the grass.
Between my fingers the green blades,
And the green blades pressed against my body.
“Who is she leaning so heavily upon me?”
Sang the grass.
“Why does she weep on my bosom,
Mingling her tears with the tears of my mystic lover?
Foolish little earth child!
It is not yet time.
One day I shall open my bosom
And you shall slip in—but not weeping.
Then in the early morning
Long before Dawn time
Your lover will lie in the paddock.
Between his fingers the green blades
And the green blades pressed against his body . . .
My song shall not sound cold to him
In my deep wave he will find the wave of your hair
In my strong sweet perfume, the perfume of your kisses.
Long and long he will lie there . . .
Laughing—not weeping.”
The Earth-Child in the Grass, Katherine Mansfield
To be able to walk along and see
the fierce green sun
the meadow grass the tall gently bobbing weeds
then to take a walk inside yourself
and see trees tall as Tom Thumb
It’s always raining here It never rains
I’m strolling among the shadows of everyone
I’ve ever loved
But this morning I was flying with the birds
Not knowing like the map there was a destination
But it was fun
Like making love on Tuesday instead of
our customary Sunday afternoon
I’ve learned to suffocate death
and continue doing so all day
Song, Paul Carroll
For Lefebvre, ‘moments’ are intense experiences in which everyday life is suspended and possibilities for authenticity, creativity or transcendence are opened up. These moments – whether aesthetic, amorous or revolutionary – reveal the potential richness of existence, both individual and collective. This approach seeks to break with the reproduction of relations of domination.
“The initial theory at Hugging Face was that some group of humans had harnessed an A.I. to conduct the attack on its behalf.” (New Yorker)
Anatomy of a Frontier Lab Agent Intrusion: A Technical Timeline of the July 2026 Incident (Hugging Face)
for Frank O’Hara
Frank, we have become an urban species
at this moment many millions of humans are
standing on some corner waiting like me
for a signal permitting us to go,
a signal depicting a small pale pedestrian
to be followed by a sea-green light
we do not use this opportunity
to tune in to eternity
we bounce upon our toes impatiently
It is a Thursday morning, Frank, and I feel
rather acutely alive but I need a thing of beauty
or a theory of beauty to reconcile me
to the lumps of garbage I cannot love enclosed
in these tough shiny black plastic bags
heaped along the curb of 97th Street, my street—
like a hideous reminder of the fate we all expect
letting the bulky slimy truth of waste
attack our aesthetic sense and joie de vivre
reliably every Thursday. Let me scan the handsome amber
columned and corniced dwellings
reflected in rear windows of parked cars, let me wish
luck to their hives of intimacies, people
in kitchens finishing a morning coffee
saying see you later to the ones they live with
Let me raise my eyes to the blue veil adrift
between and above the artifice of buildings
and at last I am slipping through a flaw in time
where the string of white headlights approaching, the string
of red taillights departing, seem as if
they carry some kind of message
perhaps the message is that one block west
Riverside Park extends its length
at the edge of Manhattan like the downy arm
of a tender, amusing, beautiful lover,
and after that is the deathless river
but waiting for the light feels like forever
Waiting for the Light, Alicia Ostriker
“what remains is//always, only, voice.”
“what thou lovest well/remains,”
Jorie Graham
“What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage… What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee.”
Canto LXXXI, Ezra Pound
Refusing to Look Away, Anahid Nersessian. A review of Killing Spree, by the poet Jorie Graham. (New York Review August 20, 2026)
If Killing Spree were merely a lament for a greener, cooler, unpoisoned planet it would still be full of beautiful poems, but it would not achieve the moral sublimity that Graham does. This is a book in which ecocide and genocide go hand in hand, as they do in real life. Several of Graham’s poems appear to be set in Gaza, where war has severely polluted the water and soil. (I say they appear to be set in Gaza although, of course, the location might also be Lebanon or Iran.) “The Zero Point” describes a father in a tent with his son just after the tent is hit by a missile. Graham addresses this father as “you” and also speaks of him in the third person, as if to remind the reader that it is only thanks to an accident of history that she is sitting somewhere in safety, reading a book of poetry, while thousands of miles away some of the world’s wealthiest nations cheerfully drop bombs on refugee camps:
What is that springing forth,
that deep inhalation followed by
nothing.
It’s the trees. Listen to me, think of wind in trees.
Yes the drones pass over and this is their wind.
But it’s still a precious thing. A pure thing. Wind.
It will brush you as though there were leaves, as though there were trees.
When is the last time you saw trees
The Killing Spree, Jorie Graham
I do not know how
she felt, but I keep
thinking of her—
screaming out to an empty street.
I had been asleep
when I heard a voice
screaming, Help!
and frantic, when I opened my door.
I remember her shoulders
in the faded towel I found
before she put on my blue sweats
and white T-shirt. Call 911
please, she said.
When the officer arrived
I said, I found her there after the—
But she said,
No, that wasn’t what
happened.
What must be valued
I’m learning,
in clarity and in error,
are spaces
where
feelings are held.
Here—in a poem?
And elsewhere
Spaces, Jenny Johnson