Genre: Poetry

“Life itself is kinship. We’re all a community of air,” says Mohammad Saud who operates a bird clinic in Delhi with his brother Nadeem Shehzad that predominantly treats the city’s omnipresent black kites and is the center of Shaunak Sen’s 2022 award-winning documentary, All That Breathes. The film is filled with footage not only of the raptors, but also of the many other creatures—including insects, reptiles, rats, and dogs—that have adapted to an urban environment teeming with pollution and sectarian violence, creating a sense of precarious, precious kinship between human civilization and nonhuman life. Write a poem that draws on observation of all the things that breathe around you. What lives in your local “community of air?”

In a recent New York Times article, architecture critic Michael Kimmelman visits various DIY concrete ramps in front of New York City bodegas with photographer Tom Wilson, who sees the ramps as “urban geology,” creative workarounds to make the shop doors accessible for hand trucks, strollers, and wheelchairs. Kimmelman describes the bodega ramps as a Rorschach test as they bring to mind glaciers, tongues, clamshells, ziggurats, and even “ladles of pancake batter spreading on a griddle.” Compose a poem dedicated to an overlooked feature of your locale, whether something in an urban environment that parallels natural formations or something in a more rural environment that reminds you of urban structures. You might play with features of concrete poetry, photographs, or illustrations to accompany your piece.

Sparrows have appeared in poetry throughout time—from Catullus writing about Lesbia’s pet sparrow to works by Sappho, Emily Dickinson, William Butler Yeats, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Charles Bukowski. In Susan Howe’s Penitential Cries, forthcoming in September from New Directions, the concluding poem, “Chipping Sparrow,” with its clipped pacing and sound, as if to mimic a sparrow’s, illuminates a clear-eyed but lyrical notion of time as well as the physicality of life as experienced from the eighty-eight-year-old poet’s perspective. “Left the body // Drowsd a little / Done with soul / – // What to think / Dusting up crown // Garment mirror / Pull me close / – // Quietness and calm / Rest and rejoice // No more doubt / Astonishing!” Spend some time browsing through poems that mention this ubiquitous bird and note the range of symbolism: eros, love, humility, fragility. Then write your own sparrow poem that commemorates where you are in your life.