Poems Rethabile Likes

Wellwater by Karen Solie | Poems Rethabile Likes “Wellwater,” by Karen Solie Poet Karen Solie reads from “Wellwater,” from her collection Wellwater (Picador Poetry, 2025), winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize. Read more about the collection "The poems of Wellwater come from the whole of an adventurously lived life. They hold the two sentiments 'The world is a beautiful place / The world is a terrible place', in perfect equipoise. They offer no happy endings, no salvation in past or future, in epiphany or private happiness. And yet they are anything but grim, with an ironic humour that plays over our increasingly euphemism-hungry culture." — Michael Hofmann Here is how “Wellwater” opens: I didn’t know what I had, drove the watertruck underage to the well in a swimsuit, anoi...

The Amen Stone by Yehuda Amichai (translated by Chana Bloch & Chana Kronfeld) | Poems Rethabile Likes The Amen Stone by Yehuda Amichai On my desk there is a stone with the word "Amen" on it, a triangular fragment of stone from a Jewish graveyard destroyed many generations ago. The other fragments, hundreds upon hundreds, were scattered helter-skelter, and a great yearning, a longing without end, fills them all: first name in search of family name, date of death seeks dead man's birthplace, son's name wishes to locate name of father, date of birth seeks reunion with soul that wishes to rest in peace. And until they have found on...

Wristwatch by Ron Padgett | Poems Rethabile Likes Wristwatch by Ron Padgett I've just written six or seven short poems in about half an hour, in a cabin on a pond with raindrops. Maybe I should just sit here for a while, let some time pass so my wife will think I've been working hard. See that? Some time just went past but so quietly you might have missed it. Then it morphed into the sky. Look, another one! It came out of my wristwatch and slipped away. P...

The Other Option by Antonia Alexandra Klimenko | Poems Rethabile Likes The Other Option by Antonia Alexandra Klimenko No No thank you No thank you     No thank you! Just no Just not feeling it Just not not     not not no     No!     NO!! What part of no     DON'T you understand? N     O Please remove your hand Please remove your hand No None of that     None     Nada Nada thing     Nothing Silence     The Unspoken...

Hibernal by Babette Deutsch | Poems Rethabile Likes Hibernal by Babette Deutsch The park is winter-plucked. The sky and the grey pavement show a sheeted face: the covered stare of one who had to die. Now, when men sweat, shoveling muddy snow or heaving ice, they know the helpless sweat that will not wet them twice, they know the staggering heart, the smothered breath that stand between this knowing and the end. Though they must drag a net of heavy hours about their straining limbs, though they behold love like a pillar of cloud, a pillar of fire— this net will break before they tire, this cloud, this ...

The Word That Is a Prayer by Ellery Akers | Poems Rethabile Likes The Word That Is a Prayer by Ellery Akers One thing you know when you say it: all over the earth people are saying it with you; a child blurting it out as the seizures take her, a woman reciting it on a cot in a hospital. What if you take a cab through the Tenderloin: at a street light, a man in a wool cap, yarn unraveling across his face, knocks at the window; he says, Please. By the time you hear what he's saying, the light changes, the cab pulls away, and you don't go back, though you know someone just prayed to you the way you pray. P...