Dear Readers,
Whenever I am by the ocean, I walk on the beach and look for stones, sand dollars, and shells. I collect them and take them home, for no particular purpose but to enjoy their shapes. Sometimes I spot an especially impressive specimen half-buried in the sand and am disappointed when, upon excavation, I find it broken. I want intact shells, not fragments. Virginia Craighill reminds us in her poem Scavengers: “but broken things have their own pattern.” So much is broken. We find it disturbing, and our impulse is to fix it. When we cannot restore it flawlessly, we practice the art of kintsugi, the Japanese technique now so popular in the self-help books, to highlight the cracks. But maybe we need to sit with the brokenness for a while, accept it, learn to be comfortable around it, “let them fall in fragments as they will.”
Several poems in this issue speak about grief. When we are left with an absence we cannot fill, a tear we cannot mend, we must sit with the fragments and wait until they reveal their pattern. I love what J.L. Yocum says in his poem Your father: “love is the blueprint to grief’s concrete foundation.”
The poems in this issue have us ponder a doe as a map, invite us to an earthworm’s funeral procession, remember grandfathers and fathers.
Many of the poems are strongly rooted in places. We travel to a creek in the Pacific Northwest, to a salt flat on an island in Massachusetts, to the rainforest in a National Park in India. How marvelous that humans in so many different places share this universal impulse to craft their thoughts into poems and to send them out into the world – like the asters that have now finished their labor of blooming and send their seeds on little parachutes into the unknown, not knowing whether they will land on fertile soil. It takes courage and hope. By letting these kernels of human creativity land with you, dear readers, you too, are part of this radical act of hope. Thank you for being here.
Agnes Vojta
