I feel as though I have seen more innocent blood spilled in 2016 than in any other year. We have lost key icons (I am looking at you David Bowie, Alan Rickman,and Elie Wiesel.) We have been consistently reminded of the evil that riddles our society and that fear of what a person can't understand and accept can lead to the justification for massacre. We have witnessed tragedies such as Orlando, Istanbul, Nice, Paris, Beirut, Baghdad, Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, Dallas, Deeniquia Dodds, 137 Black lives lost to racial terror...the list can sadly go on.

Perhaps it is because I have paid more attention. Or maybe the heaviness I feel from my friends and loved one's shutters through my bones, pulses through my already cavernous heart and finally caught up and bubbles over. Maybe it is because I have faced my own battles, and maybe because I have seen sincerely the worst in others that have been in the shadows. Maybe it is because this American election year has been a true emotional toll—both rising up a political movement centered on light and another centered on hate. Maybe it is because I have realized that people find it easier to associate a whole religion as violent then to the small percentage of radicals within it that causes the bloodshed. Maybe it is because anyone who is not Christian, white and cisgender seem to be the most protected—while every other person who does not fit this tightly knitted category is seen as a nuisance or a threat to the social order.

I can tell that we as a society are becoming complacent with the fact that people die with no rhyme or reason. We are used to it. We are piled high with information that we become convinced we cannot change, so we are buried deeper into the comfort of being numb and scrolling past it. Our hearts are caged. Some have become too guarded, too jaded, too individualistic—we are losing our ability to empathize with each and every flashy headline. It is OK not to feel all the time, to turn away from our phones and televisions to reclaim our peace of mind but I do fear we never turn back around to face this truth. So, while it may be difficult to have these conversations with our friends and family...sometimes I turn to poetry to give me back some of my oompth to move forward even when the world looks to be in shambles. Or, perhaps, some guidance on why the world might seem this way. There is this relentless light in the written word, so I hope some my favorite poems give you the ability to keep your spirit intact.

1. Snake by D.H Lawrence

A snake came to my water-trough

On a hot, hot day, and I in pajamas for the heat,

To drink there.

In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob-tree
I came down the steps with my pitcher
And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the trough before
me.

He reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in the gloom
And trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down, over the edge of
the stone trough
And rested his throat upon the stone bottom,
And where the water had dripped from the tap, in a small clearness,
He sipped with his straight mouth,
Softly drank through his straight gums, into his slack long body,
Silently.

Someone was before me at my water-trough,
And I, like a second comer, waiting.

He lifted his head from his drinking, as cattle do,
And looked at me vaguely, as drinking cattle do,
And flickered his two-forked tongue from his lips, and mused a moment,
And stooped and drank a little more,
Being earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning bowels of the earth
On the day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking.
The voice of my education said to me
He must be killed,
For in Sicily the black, black snakes are innocent, the gold are venomous.

And voices in me said, If you were a man
You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off.

But must I confess how I liked him,
How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to drink at my water-trough
And depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless,
Into the burning bowels of this earth?

Was it cowardice, that I dared not kill him? Was it perversity, that I longed to talk to him? Was it humility, to feel so honoured?
I felt so honoured.

And yet those voices:
If you were not afraid, you would kill him!

And truly I was afraid, I was most afraid, But even so, honoured still more
That he should seek my hospitality
From out the dark door of the secret earth.

He drank enough
And lifted his head, dreamily, as one who has drunken,
And flickered his tongue like a forked night on the air, so black,
Seeming to lick his lips,
And looked around like a god, unseeing, into the air,
And slowly turned his head,
And slowly, very slowly, as if thrice adream,
Proceeded to draw his slow length curving round
And climb again the broken bank of my wall-face.

And as he put his head into that dreadful hole,
And as he slowly drew up, snake-easing his shoulders, and entered farther,
A sort of horror, a sort of protest against his withdrawing into that horrid black hole,
Deliberately going into the blackness, and slowly drawing himself after,
Overcame me now his back was turned.

I looked round, I put down my pitcher,
I picked up a clumsy log
And threw it at the water-trough with a clatter.

I think it did not hit him,
But suddenly that part of him that was left behind convulsed in undignified haste.
Writhed like lightning, and was gone
Into the black hole, the earth-lipped fissure in the wall-front,
At which, in the intense still noon, I stared with fascination.

And immediately I regretted it.
I thought how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act!
I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human education.

And I thought of the albatross
And I wished he would come back, my snake.

For he seemed to me again like a king,
Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld,
Now due to be crowned again.

And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords
Of life.
And I have something to expiate:
A pettiness.

2. Itinerary by Adrienne Rich

i.

Burnt by lightning nevertheless
she’ll walk this terra infinita

lashes singed on her third eye
searching definite shadows for an indefinite future

Old shed-boards beaten silvery hang
askew as sheltering
some delicate indefensible existence

Long grasses shiver in a vanished doorway’s draft
a place of origins as yet unclosured and unclaimed

Writing cursive instructions on abounding air

If you arrive with ripe pears, bring a sharpened knife
Bring cyanide with the honeycomb

call before you come

ii.

Let the face of the bay be violet black the tumbled torn
kelp necklaces strewn alongshore

Stealthily over time arrives the chokehold
stifling ocean’s guttural chorales
a tangle
of tattered plastic rags
iii.

In a physical world the great poverty would be
to live insensate shuttered against the fresh

slash of urine on a wall
low-tidal rumor of a river’s yellowed mouth
a tumor-ridden face asleep on a subway train

What would it mean to not possess
a permeable skin
explicit veil to wander in

iv.

A cracked shell crumbles.
Sun moon and salt dissect the faint
last grains

An electrical impulse zings
out ricochets
in meta-galactic orbits

a streak of nervous energy rejoins the crucible
where origins and endings meld

There was this honey-laden question mark
this thread extracted from the open
throat of existence—Lick it clean!
—let it evaporate—

3. Let's Live Suddenly Without Thinking by E.E. Cummings

let’s live suddenly without thinking

under honest trees,
a stream
does.the brain of cleverly-crinkling
-water pursues the angry dream
of the shore. By midnight,
a moon
scratches the skin of the organised hills

an edged nothing begins to prune

let’s live like the light that kills
and let’s as silence,
because Whirl’s after all:
(after me)love,and after you.
I occasionally feel vague how
vague I don’t know tenuous Now-
spears and The Then-arrows making do
our mouths something red,something tall

4. They Are Hostile Nations by Margaret Atwood

i

In view of the fading animals

the proliferation of sewers and fears

the sea clogging, the air

nearing extinction

we should be kind, we should

take warning, we should forgive each other

Instead we are opposite, we

touch as though attacking,

the gifts we bring

even in good faith maybe

warp in our hands to

implements, to manoeuvres

ii

Put down the target of me

you guard inside your binoculars,

in turn I will surrender

this aerial photograph

(your vulnerable

sections marked in red)

I have found so useful

See, we are alone in

the dormant field, the snow

that cannot be eaten or captured

iii

Here there are no armies

here there is no money

It is cold and getting colder,

We need each others’

breathing, warmth, surviving

is the only war

we can afford, stay

walking with me, there is almost

time / if we can only

make it as far as

5. Poet's Obligation by Pablo Neruda

To whoever is not listening to the sea
this Friday morning, to whoever is cooped up
in house or office, factory or woman
or street or mine or harsh prison cell;
to him I come, and, without speaking or looking,
I arrive and open the door of his prison,
and a vibration starts up, vague and insistent,
a great fragment of thunder sets in motion
the rumble of the planet and the foam,
the raucous rivers of the ocean flood,
the star vibrates swiftly in its corona,
and the sea is beating, dying and continuing.

So, drawn on by my destiny,
I ceaselessly must listen to and keep
the sea's lamenting in my awareness,
I must feel the crash of the hard water
and gather it up in a perpetual cup
so that, wherever those in prison may be,
wherever they suffer the autumn's castigation,
I may be there with an errant wave,
I may move, passing through windows,
and hearing me, eyes will glance upward
saying 'How can I reach the sea?'
And I shall broadcast, saying nothing,
the starry echoes of the wave,
a breaking up of foam and quicksand,
a rustling of salt withdrawing,
the grey cry of the sea-birds on the coast.

So, through me, freedom and the sea
will make their answer to the shuttered heart.