The Consolations

Beauty, friendship, love--and poetry!

Who else is feeling a sense of existential dread just now? I’m afraid about the looming threat of that monster whose name I don’t even want to write here—and maybe even more so for his (for now) willing-to-grovel, obviously power-mad, and seemingly soulless running-mate. Whatever force built these men neglected to bestow either of them with a moral compass.

It could happen here.

Heather Cox Richardson’s column today lays it all out very clearly. Please read her words and share them widely—and vote.

Vote with the knowledge that your life and the lives of your children, their children, and the very life of our planet may depend on the outcome of the 2024 U.S. election, up and down the ballot.

Freedom and democracy and so much else that we hold dear has not been this imperiled since Hitler’s rise to power. Let us all do whatever we can to find the path that will lead our very imperfect species toward wisdom and healing.

This is my prayer for myself. This is my prayer for the world.

*****

How beautiful is the autumn here in Connecticut?

Senescence, as it pertains to foliage, is something for which we can all feel grateful.

Beauty. Friendship that is deep and true. The ways in which love allows us to see what is best and most generous in ourselves and others. These are, for me, the consolations for all the sorrow we see and feel in this world that is, all too often, so unfair and cruel.

Can poetry help heal the world?

I think we need poetry now, more than ever.

Mirror for the Wind

To minister to the Earth, in gratitude
for what it gives to me: bucket by bucket of water,
collected from the outdoor shower,
delivered to my netted row of blueberries.

I’m Clara Barton to the plants
in my drought-stricken garden.

What the trees and leaves are to the wind,
just so, the poets are moved by spirits
that would otherwise be unheard.
Word by channeled word.

Without the wind, the trees would never sway
and not a single leaf would shimmer.
The wind is only seen by way
of what it acts upon.

Poets sing the songs they overhear
telegraphed by every living thing.

Give water to a thirsty plant, and hear it drink.
Watch slowly, and you’ll see foliage flush with color
and a new leaf unfurl, topped
by a crystalline drop
of the stuff of life.

I am not a woman or a wife
but a future tree:

Mirror for the wind.


From my forthcoming chapbook from Blue Moose Publishing, This Dark Soil
copyright © 2024 by Barbara Quick

I’m fortunate to have an abundance of extremely talented and accomplished writer friends. One of these is Iris Jamahl Dunkle, whose biography of Sanora Babb has just been published by the University of California Press. I’m not in the habit of making predictions. But I predict that Iris’s deeply affecting book—”heartbreaking and heroic,” according to Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan, producers of The Dust Bowl—is going to win a Pulitzer Prize.

Iris has agreed to do an interview with me, which I’ll publish here with my next post.

Stay tuned!