POETRY Archives - Reinventing Home

A guide to the well-lived life. Reads like Brainpickings for the home, covering everything from relationships and culture to our place in the natural world.

Explores our longing for sanctuary, considering everything from climate migration and new work patterns to our mythology of home. A treasure trove of journalism, art, and storytelling.

Considers ancient traditions of honoring the hearth and modern challenges of rootlessness, lack of time, and loss of place. A meditation on our sense of longing and belonging---and our search of home wherever we can find it.

Celebrating Childhood

Even the wind wants
to become a cart
pulled by butterflies.

I remember madness
leaning for the first time
on the mind’s pillow.
I was talking to my body then
and my body was an idea
I wrote in red.

Emergence in Four Parts

Kim Fowler explores her family history, beginning with a plantation owner’s son and a grandmother born at the end of slavery, in this ode to Black identity.

Wild Geese, Revisited

In her much-beloved poem, Wild Geese, Mary Oliver has something to say about our endless attempts to prove ourselves. Life “calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting,” she says, reminding you of your home in the family of things. Adrie Kussarow reworked Wild Geese to help us sort through our knee-jerk responses to the coronavirus.

Keeping a Nature Journal

During the coronavirus, our daily forays into the natural world have kept us sane, and we’ve been extremely grateful for access to a park, a hiking trail, a meadow or a garden. As our world shifts, we keep returning to the landscape for a sense of solace, and more of us are keeping a Nature Journal.

After Lorca

While travel is restricted we can conjure up a place in the imagination. Here’s how a poet visits faraway places while staying close to home.

The Romantic Quest of an Extension Cord

Edward Dougherty explores the longings run like electric current through the mind of an extension cord.

Life Lessons

Poet Richard Beban considers two life lessons: What to do when Joy gets in your eyes. How to say goodbye to a well-loved shirt.

The Mountaineer’s Wife

Poet Barbara Swift Brauer considers what happens to a marriage when we bring the outside in.

From My Home to Yours

Poet Mercilee Jenkins says home is an organic thing. When we move on, the spirit of a house remains.

POETRY

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