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On this last day of poetry month, let’s savor one last page from The New Yorker’s store of century-defining poems—the classics that we return to again and again. “What Work Is,” by Knopf poet Philip Levine (1948–2015), is one of them—a poem that never ages in its call to our humanity. Thank you for heeding that call and for sharing poems with your people in these challenging times.

What Work Is

We stand in the rain in a long line waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work. You know what work is—if you’re old enough to read this you know what work is, although you may not do it. Forget you. This is about waiting, shifting from one foot to another. Feeling the light rain falling like mist into your hair, blurring your vision until you think you see your own brother ahead of you, maybe ten places. You rub your glasses with your fingers, and of course it’s someone else’s brother, narrower across the shoulders than yours but with the same sad slouch, the grin that does not hide the stubbornness, the sad refusal to give in to rain, to the hours wasted waiting, to the knowledge that somewhere ahead a man is waiting who will say, “No, we’re not hiring today,” for any reason he wants. You love your brother, now suddenly you can hardly stand the love flooding you for your brother, who’s not beside you or behind or ahead because he’s home trying to sleep off a miserable night shift at Cadillac so he can get up before noon to study his German. Works eight hours a night so he can sing Wagner, the opera you hate most, the worst music ever invented. How long has it been since you told him you loved him, held his wide shoulders, opened your eyes wide and said those words, and maybe kissed his cheek? You’ve never done something so simple, so obvious, not because you’re too young or too dumb, not because you’re jealous or even mean or incapable of crying in the presence of another man, no, just because you don’t know what work is.

More on this book and author:

Browse books by Philip Levine. 

Learn more about A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker and browse the companion centennial anthology, A Century of Fiction in The New Yorker.

Hear Kevin Young, poetry editor at The New Yorker and editor of A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker, speak to Knopf editor Deborah Garrison about the poetry anthology in a special New Yorker Poetry Podcast episode.

Celebrate The New Yorker’s centenary with additional events throughout 2025 including special exhibitions from the New York Public Library (A Century of The New Yorker, running from Feb. 22, 2025 – Feb. 21, 2026 and available online here) and the Society of Illustrators (Drawn From The New Yorker, running from Jan 8, 2025 – May 3, 2025).

Visit our Tumblr to share this poem and peruse other poems, audio recordings, and broadsides in the Knopf poem-a-day series.

To share the poem-a-day experience with friends, pass along this link.

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Jamie Hood’s revelatory memoir Trauma Plot came out last month, but readers of her thrillingly hybrid poetry-as-diary-as-lit-crit debut, How to Be a GoodGirl, published in 2020 and newly available as a Vintage paperback, will already know some of her story. Repeated assaults on her body have forced certain subject matter upon her, but her intellectual exuberance, coupled with her bracing practicality—her embracing or discarding, as needed, the reasons to write about trauma at all—make the reader eager to accompany her. Here’s a short passage from the introduction to Trauma Plot, in which Hood reflects on her attraction to the myth of Philomela, and a poem entry from How to Be a Good Girl.

from Trauma Plot

The material event of Philomela’s rape was not what shattered me. After all, I could have comfortably identified with any number of raped women in the myths of antiquity—Io, Orithyia, Europa, Proserpina, Thetis. Often I’ve dreamed of Daphne as a laurel, and Apollo slipping calloused fingers beneath her bark. In one vision of the story, a self-portrait, the photographer Francesca Woodman stands arms aloft in a dense clearing, her back to the spectator. Her hands and forearms are wrapped in dead tree matter. Her hair is knotted; she’s observable and phantasmic at once. I have been her kind. For years, too, I was Medusa, ugly with the evil thrust on me: stone-eyed, untouchable, a hissing fury. But when I shed those selves, Philomela remained. Philomela and her pulsing little tongue stump; Philomela, stricken but ongoing, raving but righteous; Philomela, whose grief and wrath surface, again and again, above silence. Denied language, she learns the loom, weaving a witness into being, creating a tapestry to transmit her torment in a different design. I became entranced by this ripple in the story, its provocative diagnosis of rape as a formal problem—something that exceeds or can be clipped by language. Something that may mandate a kaleidoscopic technique of narration. I had a need of my own to reckon with the ways rape resists testimony or explodes the containers of its own telling, without in turn surrendering to the convention that trauma is, as it were, altogether unintelligible. With tongue or without, the story will out.

[thurs aug 27]

re-reading sontag’s reborn this week seeking structure in my form                   -lessness                re-reading also                                  may sarton                                  barthes                                  zambreno thinking always of how the diaristic or autofictional or confessional-i is                                                                  contextualized                   disavowed

there is a vitality & immediacy to sontag’s notebooks which i tend to think elude her larger body of work, which is hawk-eyed, imperious

i feel a kinship w the sontag of the journals—w her self-flagellation; her intellectual anxiety; her terror at being, in any real sense, sexually possessed; or out of control

this kinship perches alongside my awed regard of her essays, as if from a distance; a looking at something quite bright—too much so

i am not a list-keeper although i think i should like to be

i imagine sontag calling my work cheap

i imagine sontag calling me cheap

this touches the erotic

i notice in my center part a half dozen stray gray hairs as if in intimacy; i press them against my lips in prayer

More about these books and author:

Learn more about Trauma Plot and How to Be a Good Girl by Jamie Hood and follow her on X and Instagram @veryhotmommm.

Hear Jamie Hood read at Franklin Park in Brooklyn, NY on May 19 at 8:00 PM. 

Visit our Tumblr to peruse poems, audio recordings, and broadsides in the Knopf poem-a-day series.

To share the poem-a-day experience with friends, pass along this link.

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The poets in The New Yorker’s centennial anthology include a number who have been members of the magazine’s editorial staff: among them the volume’s editor, Kevin Young, the current poetry editor there; Deborah Garrison, Knopf’s poetry editor, who was a staffer in the 1980s and 90s; Caroline Fraser, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for her biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder and once a fact checker at the magazine; Jay Fielden, a former editor-in-chief of Esquire and Men’s Vogue, who worked in the Fiction Department as a young man. But probably the longest-running New Yorker employee / poet was the Scottish writer Alastair Reid (1926-2014). Garrison remembers his small interior office across the hall from her own in the 1990s: “He always slipped by at a clip—busy with his own thoughts—but if I looked up, there’d be a sideways smile and a word or two about a poem or piece he admired that week before he shut himself in and I'd hear a little pecking at the typewriter. We all waited for anything he’d write, like his marvelous piece about knowing Robert Graves when he was young. I revered his poetry.” Here is his “Ghosts.”

Ghosts

Never to see ghosts? Then to be haunted by what is, only—to believe that glass is for looking through, that rooms, too, can be empty, the past past, deeds done, that sleep, however troubled, is your own? Do the dead lie down, then? Are blind men blind? Is love in touch alone? Do lights go out? And what is that shifting, shifting in the mind?      The wind, the wind?

No, they are there. Let your ear be gentle, At dawn or owl cry, over doorway or lintel, theirs are the voices moving night toward morning, the garden’s grief, the river’s warning. Their curious presence in a kiss, the past quivering in what is, our words odd-sounding, not our own— how can we think we sleep alone?

What do they have to tell? If we can listen, their voices are denials of all dying, faint, on a long bell tone, lying beyond sound or belief, in the oblique last reach of the sense through layers of recognition. . . . Ghost on my desk, speak, speak.

More on this book and author:

Here is "Remembering Robert Graves," Alastair Reid's piece on his relationship with the poet. For more of Alastair Reid’s poetry, read his collected poems, Barefoot. 

Learn more about A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker and browse the companion centennial anthology, A Century of Fiction in The New Yorker.

Celebrate The New Yorker’s centenary with additional events throughout 2025 including special exhibitions from the New York Public Library (A Century of The New Yorker, running from Feb. 22, 2025 – Feb. 21, 2026 and available online here) and the Society of Illustrators (Drawn From The New Yorker, running from Jan 8, 2025 – May 3, 2025).

Hear David Remnick editor of The New Yorker speak to editors Deborah Treisman and Kevin Young discuss the literary anthologies published for the magazine’s centennial in a special episode of The New Yorker Radio Hour.

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The poet Leila Mottley is coming out with her second novel, The Girls Who Grew Big, this June. Narrated by three young women in the Florida panhandle, the book is about teen pregnancy, female friendship, and the power of community, with a group known as “The Girls” at its center, supporting each other in vital ways on their challenging paths through birth and early mothering. The poetry in Mottley’s prose comes through in this excerpt from the point of view of Adela, a high school junior from Indiana and nationally ranked swimmer with high hopes for college and the Olympics, who has been sent to live out her unexpected pregnancy with her grandmother in the panhandle town of Padua Beach. 

from The Girls Who Grew Big 

After about twenty minutes of sweating myself into a damp droop on the edge of the highway, I saw sand. I’d never seen anything like it, the sand making mountains Noni said they called dunes and what had been trees on both sides of the highway turned into a tunnel of sand and weeds. Later I would learn there was a parking lot and an entrance onto the beach, but all I saw that first time was the dunes, and so I started to climb them. My feet lost their grip inside the sand, my hands turned ashy, and it took me ten minutes to climb to the top, but once I got there, I saw it.      The water.      Ocean not just in front of me but to all my sides, stretched out so it almost blended with the sky on the horizon. Clear but somehow murky. Even from far away, I could feel the sting of salt on my feet, the soft caress of warm water against my ankles. It was nothing I could have imagined before, not in the movies, not in books, not from descriptions of my friends’ Hawaiian vacations. The real thing was grandiose, endless, pure. A magnificent green blurring into nothing, where sight could no longer comprehend her reach.      Sixteen and I’d never seen the ocean. I’d lived in artificial waters my whole life, thought I knew what it meant to absorb. To look out into blue and feel known. But as I slid down the dune onto the beach and began walking across it, my ankles aching, I was aware of how wrong I’d been.      A pool made you feel invincible, but an ocean did the opposite. It reminded you what a fragile thing you were, how every cell that made you up was nothing in comparison to the waves that could take you down as quickly as a bullet shot through your softest skin. And walking on the beach, that white sand fine as powder and squeaky, I felt, for the first time, how this small thing inside me could consume my whole being. How, in a matter of months, I would have nothing to hide behind.      I just wanted to touch the water.      I stepped into the first edges of it, surprised by its warmth, by how green it was, with some kind of algae floating around in it. After touching it, I needed to feel more, so I kept walking. Shins, knees, thighs, the water lapping at my skin, my fingertips grazing it, and as I breathed the sea in, I heard the sounds of them laughing, music booming.      I turned away from the water to see the Girls across the beach, up in that red truck again, and it seemed like there were even more of them than there had been when we drove into town this afternoon, toddlers crouched in the sand. I thought I could see one of them looking straight at me, but I couldn’t make her face out, not before the wave came up and threatened to take me under.

More on this book and author: 

·        Learn more about The Girls Who Grew Big by Leila Mottley.

·        Browse other books by Leila Mottleyand follow her on Instagram@leilamottley.

·        Read Leila’s piece on Harper’s Bazaar for insight into her writing process for The Girls Who Grew Bigand how looking at the past can inform our understanding of our contemporary moment. 

·        Join Leila Mottley at Mrs. Dalloway’s in Berkeley, CA for the book launch of The Girls Who Grew Big on June 24 at 7:00 PM. Leila will be joined in conversation by author Ingrid Rojas Contreras and will sign copies of her book after the presentation. On June 25, Leila will be reading at Elliot Bay Book Company in Seattle, WA at 7:00 PM. On June 27, Leila will be reading at Greenlight Bookstore in Brooklyn, NY. Please check Leila Mottley’s author page for more information about other upcoming readings and events.

·        Visit our Tumblr to peruse poems, audio recordings, and broadsides in the Knopf poem-a-day series.

·        To share the poem-a-day experience with friends, pass along this link.

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The letters of the writer and groundbreaking neurological investigator Oliver Sacks–now collected in a volume that displays on every page his boundless curiosity and love of the human animal in its myriad ways of perceiving the world–include several to the poet W. H. Auden, among other literary lights. We unfortunately have no record of the Coleridge quote Sacks refers to in this missive to Auden of August 18, 1971, but the line he mentions from the German Romantic poet Novalis was surely a favorite aphorism of Oliver’s: “Every disease is a musical problem; its care a musical solution.” We also share below the typescript of Auden’s poem “Anthem,” which the poet had enclosed in his foregoing letter to Sacks, written on August 2, where he ended by saying: “Overleaf a little poem about the Cosmos. Yours ever, Wystan.”

Letter to W. H. AudenAugust 18,1971 [37 Mapesbury Rd., London]

Dear Wystan,

Your letter was forwarded to me a few days ago, and it (or your poem, or you) was the best of palliatives. Does there come a point (if one is very lucky, or has the right gifts, or grace, or works at it) when style, feeling, content, judgement all flow together and assume the right form? Your “Anthem” seems instinctively and effortlessly lyrical, and absolutely natural, like an organic growth; and yet obviously has the most careful and sophisticated and exquisite choice of words—and no feeling of any “joins” anywhere, of artifice, of manipulation. Marvellous. I will treasure it.      Yes, I thought the Coleridge quote was a real find, and so to the point. And I agree (I feel) absolutely with the Novalis one. In some sense, I think, my medical sense is a musical one. I diagnose by the feeling of discordancy, or of some peculiarity of harmony. And it’s immediate, total, and gestalt. My sleeping-sickness patients have innumerable types of strange “crises,” immensely complex, absolutely specific, yet completely indescribable. I recognize them all now as I recognize a bar of Brahms or Mahler. And so do the patients. Such strange physiological harmonies—I hope I can find some way to describe these, because they are unique states, at the edges of being, beyond imaginable being, beneath comprehension, and when the last of the sleeping-sickness patients die (they are very old now) no memory will be left of their extraordinary states. Writing seems more of a struggle now—maybe I’m trying something harder—I find meanings go out of focus, or there is some sort of “slippage” between word and meaning, and the phrase which seemed right, yesterday, is dead today. [. . .] And medical jargon is so awful. It conveys no real picture, no impression whatever, of what—say—it feels like to be Parkinsonian. And yet it’s an absolutely specific, and intolerable feeling. A feeling of confinement, but of an inner constraint and confinement and cramp and crushedness, which is closely analogous to depression (although it is not emotional as such), and, of course, is very depressing. And a painful inner conflict—one patient called it the push-and-pull, another the goad-and-halter. It’s a most hateful condition, although it has a sort of elegant formal structure. But no book that I know of brings home that Parkinsonism feels like this—they just reduce it to an unevocative listing of symptoms. I hope Osbert Sitwell didn’t have it too badly.       I’ve been reading some Goethe (for the first time, really) in the last week or two. Starting with his Italian Journey—thank God I did start with that, or I might not have got any further. And then the Pelican Faust—maybe it’s the same with any translation. I must learn German. And Mann’s fabulous essay on Goethe and Tolstoy. And Elective Affinities. And that great, meandering, affectionate Lewes biography. There is one point (I think in his chapter on Goethe’s philanthropy) where Lewes says that he could “eat Goethe for love”—and I think these are beginning to be my sentiments too.       I hope I can join Orlan on a lightning visit to Vienna. There is nothing I would like more, but I am awfully fretted with my current book, and may not be at liberty (or feel myself at liberty) until I have finished it. I would love to see you in your own Kirchstetten, but if I cannot come I will surely see you in New York a few weeks later. 

Yours ever, [Oliver]

More on this book and author:

Learn more about Letters by Oliver Sacks.

Read “Anthem” and more of W. H. Auden’s poems in Collected Poems. 

Browse other books by Oliver Sacks and follow the Oliver Sacks Foundation on Instagram @oliversacksfdn.

Visit our Tumblr to peruse poems, audio recordings, and broadsides in the Knopf poem-a-day series.

To share the poem-a-day experience with friends, pass along this link.

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A demand for honesty about where we humans stand in the world we’ve made lives at the core of the simplest poem by Jane Hirshfield. That is, nothing is ever simple. But her way of expressing this remains captivating in its clarity. This one is from her 2020 collection Ledger.

A Ream of Paper

I have a ream of paper, a cartridge of ink,

almonds, coffee, a wool scarf for warmth.

Whatever handcuffs the soul, I have brought here.

Whatever distances the heart, I have brought here.

A deer rises onto her haunches to reach for an apple,

though many fallen apples are on the ground.

More on this book and author:

Learn more about Ledger by Jane Hirshfield and her recent selected poems, The Asking.

Browse other books by Jane Hirshfield and follow her @janehirshfield on Facebook.

Jane Hirshfield will give a reading at the 222 in Healdsburg, CA on May 3 at 7:00 pm and will be at the Wisconsin Book Festival reading at the Central Library on May 12 at 6:00 pm. She will also be at the Camden Festival of Poetry in Camden, Maine, giving a virtual craft talk on May 16 at 2:00 PM and delivering the keynote address on May 17 at 4:15 PM.

Visit our Tumblr to peruse poems, audio recordings, and broadsides in the Knopf poem-a-day series.

To share the poem-a-day experience with friends, pass along this link.

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The little poem that can punch above its weight has a long tradition in The New Yorker. No poem is too short to matter—as in Louise Bogan’s couplet below, with a title longer than the poem itself. With this sampling, we also offer up their excellent versions from the audiobook of the magazine’s poetry anthology, performed by a diverse community of professional narrators, who delighted in the chance to give voice to a vast array of poets and their work.

"Solitary Observation Brought Back From a Short Sojourn in Hell" by Louise Bogan

At midnight tears Run into your ears.

"Wake" by Langston Hughes

Tell all my mourners To mourn in red— ’Cause there ain’t no sense In my bein’ dead.

"Superfluous Advice" by Dorothy Parker

Should they whisper false of you,      Never trouble to deny; Should the words they speak be true,      Weep and storm and swear they lie.

"My Father Was a Snowman" by Sparrow

My father was a snowman, but he melted.

All that’s left is his eyes—two pieces of coal— that sit on my kitchen table and watch me as I walk around the room.

I ate his nose a long time ago.

More on this book and author:

Learn more about A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker and browse the companion centennial anthology, A Century of Fiction in The New Yorker.

Hear Kevin Young, poetry editor at The New Yorker and editor of A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker, speak to Knopf editor Deborah Garrison about the poetry anthology in a special New Yorker Poetry Podcast episode.  

Celebrate The New Yorker’s centenary with additional events throughout 2025 including special exhibitions from the New York Public Library (A Century of The New Yorker, running from Feb. 22, 2025 – Feb. 21, 2026 and available online here) and the Society of Illustrators (Drawn From The New Yorker, running from Jan 8, 2025 – May 3, 2025).

Visit our Tumblr to share this poem and peruse other poems, audio recordings, and broadsides in the Knopf poem-a-day series.

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The voice of Kelly Caldwell, a trans woman who left this world in the spring of 2020–she is the lost lover who appears in Cass Donish’s collection Your Dazzling Death–blazes with ongoing warmth in the aftermath of her life. Her evolution as a woman and her dialogue with “c.” ground her posthumous book of poems, Letters to Forget.

[house of right hand]

Eyes on fingertips the only way To see in the dark. The bathroom light. Burnt out three weeks ago. Trying to find a god to swallow. Is like starting your mouth at your own feet And working upwards. Fingers stutter on mascara. Smeared like an ashtray. I want to be. A long-eyed woman. Talk fills the night. Like a lung. What bucket is my hand. Carrying. A briefness drawn up complete. From the shallow pools of your hips. You might not be able to tell but This is a love poem.

More on this book and author:

Learn more about Letters to Forget by Kelly Caldwell.

Visit our Tumblr to peruse poems, audiorecordings, and broadsides in the Knopfpoem-a-day series.

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Margaret Atwood’s recent Paper Boat: New and Selected Poems 1961-2023 treats us to some delightful previously uncollected poems, such as this portrait of a domestic surface and what lies beneath.

The Interior Decorator

I practise the outworn Victorian art Of hooking wool roses to cover The piano legs; limbs rather; but under These ornate surfaces, the hard Naked wood is still there.

I am industrious and clever With my hands: I execute in paint Landscapes on doorpanels and screens. Down my arranged vistas, furniture And pillows flourish in plump scenery

And on my table stands a miniature Lemon tree in a small china garden. It is prudent to thus restrain one’s eden Indoors. I never eat my bitter lemons And everything remains in its own spot

Except the devil, who is under the piano With a fringed purple tablecloth over Him. I hear him sucking lemon rinds. I cannot make him blend with my decor Even with roses: his tail sticks out behind.

More on this book and author:

Learn more about Paper Boat by Margaret Atwood.

Browse other books by Margaret Atwood and follow her on Instagram @therealmargaretatwood and X @MargaretAtwood.

Visit our Tumblr to peruse poems, audio recordings, and broadsides in the Knopf poem-a-day series.

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The poems in Resistance, Rebellion, Life were written in 2016 and early 2017, in response to the first election of Donald Trump, but Dave Lucas’s entry in the anthology could have been written yesterday. Its theme of the importance of private love, of cultivating a private life and intimate human relations in the face of surrounding threats, is eternal.

Love Poem for an Apocalypse

I wish I’d met you after everything had burned, after the markets crash and global sea levels rise. The forests scorched. The grasslands trespassed. My love, it is a whole life’s work to disappear— ask the god with his head in the wolf’s mouth or the serpent intent on swallowing all the earth. Ask the senate subcommittee for market solutions for late capitalism and early-onset dementia. You and a bird flu could make me believe in fate. I think we might be happy in the end, in the dark of a hollow tree, a seed bank or blast-proof bunker, if only you would sing the song I love, you know the one about our precious eschatology, the one I always ask to hear to lull me back to sleep.

More on this book and author:

Learn more about Resistance, Rebellion, Life, edited by Amit Majmudar.

Browse Weather by Dave Lucas and follow him on X and Instagram @FakeDaveLucas.

Visit our Tumblr to peruse poems, audio recordings, and broadsides in the Knopf poem-a-day series.

To share the poem-a-day experience with friends, pass along this link.

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Our ongoing affair with our cities, with fields, flowers, and creatures around us, and the closeness engendered by our sharing space and time with them, animates Vincent Katz’s poems in Daffodil.

City Birds Flying

Among the ugly new buildings I’ve come to like, I’ve been seeing, for a few days now, A strange and beautiful phenomenon: Birds, pigeons I assume, like to circle within their blank spaces. Whether for air current, flying bugs they can eat, convivial exercise,      whatever, They go there and add charm to these harsh, uncaring façades. Other birds fly here too, gulls and others, Here near the river, they also add glory and grace to the view. And now, my friend, my buddy, my pet, my dove Has returned and sits on the fire escape railing out my window, A light breeze ruffling his feathers.

More on this book and author:

Browse other books by Vincent Katz and learn more about Daffodil.

Vincent Katz will be in conversation with Edmund Berrigan to discuss Daffodil at 192 Books in New York, NY on April 17 at 7:00 PM. A livestream and archived recording will be available here. Vincent and Claire Millikin will read their poetry at Grolier Poetry Book Shop in Cambridge, MA on April 24 at 7:00 PM. You can register here for the in-person event or register here to tune in virtually via Zoom. Please check Vincent Katz’s author page for more information about other upcoming readings and events.

Visit our Tumblr to peruse poems, audio recordings, and broadsides in the Knopf poem-a-day series.

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Rufino Tamayo’s painting “El Hombre,” the inspiration for this poem, shows a man both grounded powerfully into the earth and reaching up to the heavens. Here the novelist and poet Sandra Cisneros gives a close account of several struggling hombres, situating them compassionately in the broader context of Mexico-U. S. relations.

El Hombre

          After Tamayo

On the eve of International Women’s Day In a field on the road to Celaya They find her body. The deaf-mute girl who Walked her dog in Parque Juárez.

No one tried, blamed, named. The town knows:

It’s her father’s debts. This is how they pay Un hombre who can’t pay.

Mándanos luz. Send us all light.

In small print, in the back Pages of today’s paper, I read this small news:

Un Hombre Purépecha Lifted from His Purépecha Village.

Daily the Purépechas demand his return. Daily el hombre does not return.

He is only one of the many “lifted.”

When you are native in your native land To whom do you demand? Who listens?

Mándanos luz. Send us all light.

The bird merchant at the Tuesday mercado, Six cages of cenzontles strapped on his back, Shoves a mesh shopping bag so close To my face, I have to step back to see. A flutter of frightened canaries. In the eyes of el hombre, The same urgency, the same fear.

Mándanos luz. Send us all light.

The gringo Alan tells me the story Of the pig who thought he was a dog. Solovino he was called, Because he came alone.

How each day Alan drove Along the road to Dolores, The dogs would run from The squatter’s shack and give chase, The pig who thought he was a dog Trotting behind them.

Until one day the pig isn’t there. The dogs disappear too. One by one by one.

Alan shrugs. When un hombre is hungry, There is no one to blame.

Mándanos luz. Send us all light.

The “Religion” section of Our Guanajuato newspaper Features an article on St. Francis, Un hombre of austerity, as A model for all to live in poverty.

This in a country where almost every Hombre, mujer y niño is already On the path to sainthood.

Mándanos luz. Send us all light.

How it happened was like this. One night Rosana catches un hombre Breaking into her grocery store, The son of a neighbor.

Her shouts wake the barrio. They’re able to hold the thief Until the police arrive.

Rosana is there to bear witness At the court proceedings. And to Witness the court set him free.

She gathers her pain in a handkerchief, Goes home and calls the boy’s mother.

Rosana and the mother of the thief. Each Woman lets loose a sea of grief.

When she tells me this story, The sea is still there in Rosana’s eyes.

Mándanos luz. Send us all light.

Carlos and Raúl, the silver-tongued Poets of Chicano, Illinois, have never Been to the country of their ancestry, Though they’re silver-haired hombres.

When I invite them south, they refuse. They’re afraid of bad hombres.

No one has told them The ones who buy drugs and Sell arms to los bad hombres Are U.S. citizens.

Mándanos luz. Send us all light.

The blind harmonica player, Un hombre who plays “Camino de Guanajuato” In front of Banco Santander, Clutches his baseball cap of small coins Whenever he hears someone running too close.

No vale nada la vida, la vida no vale nada. Life’s worth nothing, nothing is what life’s worth.

Mándanos luz. Send us all light.

Un hombre tells me: You don’t even have to learn Spanish to live here. Amado the San Miguel realtor. You can train your staff to do what you need, And you don’t have to pay them much either.

Mándanos luz. Send us all light.

Dallas, 1953. A seer named Stanley Marcus Purchases a mural by Rufino Tamayo To reinforce friendship between Texas and Mexico.

This in a time in history When Texas still posts Signs on restaurants: “No dogs or Mexicans.”

The painting is of un hombre Anchored to the earth Reaching for the heavens, A balance of earth and sky, North and south, yours and mine. Because the universe is About interconnection.

Tamayo calls this painting, Man Excelling Himself.

Mándanos luz. Send us all light.

Message from Mexico to The United States of America: When we are safe, you are safe. When you are safe, we are safe. Tell this to your politicians.

Mándanos luz. Send us all light.

There is a Mexican saying, Hablando se entiende la gente. Talking to one another We understand one another.

I would add: And listening We understand even better.

Mándanos luz. Send us all light. Mándanos luz. Send us all light. Mándanos luz. Send us all light.

More on this book and author:

Learn more about Woman Without Shame by Sandra Cisneros.

Browse our special Everyman's Library edition of The House on Mango Street and other books by Sandra Cisneros; you can follow her @officialsandracisneros on Instagram and @sandracisnerosauthor on Facebook.

On April 12, Sandra Cisneros will appear on two panels at the San Antonio Books Festival.

Visit our Tumblr to peruse poems, audio recordings, and broadsides in the Knopf poem-a-day series.

To share the poem-a-day experience with friends, pass along this link.

[aaknopf]

The New Yorker magazine’s 100th birthday book of poetry carries us through times of day (sections entitled “Morning Bell,” “Lunch Break,” “After-Work Drink,” and so on, in which poets from diverse periods mix and mingle) as well through the long day of a century (sections gathering voices of the 1920s & 1930s, 1940s & 1950s…up through the Teens and Twenties of our own time). Some of our great poets—Elizabeth Bishop, W. S. Merwin, Derek Walcott, Louise Glück, Terrance Hayes—have poems in multiple sections, a testament to their outsized influence. Anne Sexton (1928-1974) falls into this group: her ground-breaking work appeared frequently in the magazine during her lifetime, and her influence on poets who came after her appears only vaster over time. Here is her “Moon Song,” which The New Yorker published in 1968.

Moon Song

I am alive at night. I am dead in the morning— an old vessel who used up her oil, bleak and pale-boned. No miracle. No dazzle. I’m out of repair, but you are tall in your battle dress and I must arrange for your journey. I was always a virgin, old and pitted. Before the world was, I was.

I have been oranging and fat, carrot-colored, gaped at, allowing my cracked O’s to drop on the sea near Venice and Mombasa. Over Maine I have rested. I have fallen like a jet into the Pacific. I have committed perjury over Japan. I have dangled my pendulum, my fat bag, my gold, gold, blinkedy light over you all.

So if you must inquire, do so. After all, I am not artificial. I looked long upon you, love-bellied and empty, flipping my endless display for you, my cold, cold coverall man. You need only request and I will grant it. It is virtually guaranteed that you will walk into me like a barracks. So come cruising, come cruising, you of the blastoff, you of the bastion, you of the scheme. I will shut my fat eye down, headquarters of an area, house of a dream.

More on this book and author:

Learn more about A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker and browse the companion centennial anthology, A Century of Fiction in The New Yorker.

Celebrate The New Yorker's centenary with additional events throughout 2025 including special exhibitions from the New York Public Library (A Century of The New Yorker, running from Feb. 22, 2025 – Feb. 21, 2026 and available online here) and the Society of Illustrators (Drawn From The New Yorker, running from Jan 8, 2025 – May 3, 2025).

For more of Anne Sexton’s poetry, read her Complete Poems. 

Visit our Tumblr to share this poem and peruse other poems, audio recordings, and broadsides in the Knopf poem-a-day series.

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A remarkable life in poetry across four decades unfolds in the pages of Cynthia Zarin’s Next Day: New and Selected Poems. Here’s her “Bruise,” from about midway through the journey.

Bruise

          Black bruise an inch below my knee; white bone, my      kneecap wrenched askew;

          knee a blind eye, bruise a shiner, the pair of them two      goggle-eyes, bridged by

          a shiny, half-moon scar. A battered aviatrix? She      flies above a dream island.

          At three, I fell from a knee-high curb. Mind yourself,      I hear the voices say,

          when decades later, in the bath, my knee, drowned      face, knucklehead, rises

          above the water table, volcano with its violet flame.      Bedpost? Doorjamb?

          The hours last week turned to glass? And if asked      to swear to it, say

          what’s to blame? The mind trolls, reels back,      and begins, and begins

          again to prove how if I’d only done that one thing—      but there are so many.

More on this book and author:

Learn more about Next Day by Cynthia Zarin.

Browse other books by Cynthia Zarin.

Visit our Tumblr to peruse poems, audio recordings, and broadsides in the Knopf poem-a-day series.

To share the poem-a-day experience with friends, pass along this link.