January 19, 2026: “Prologue,” Marie Howe, MLK Day, “Broken Snow Shovel”

I have a confession:  I’m having difficulty writing.  

No, it’s not writer’s block.  I’m still scribbling in my journal, and every once in a while a poem appears.  Yet, on a day-to-day basis, I’m overwhelmed by the state of the world, or, more specifically, my country.  I find very little that’s uplifting and beautiful right now.  There are ruthless thugs brutalizing, kidnapping, and disappearing people across the United States.  Our unhinged pathological narcissist “leader” is invading sovereign nations; un-aliving innocents; and covering up child sex trafficking.  People are starving, losing jobs, and getting sick because our elected officials are more concerned with playing political games than actually doing what they’re paid to do:  taking care of their constituents.  It feels as if the great experiment of the United States of America is collapsing before my eyes.

That’s my struggle.

I’ve chosen Marie Howe as 2026’s poet of the year for this blog.  I’ve loved her writing for a very long time because she’s fearless.  She embraces joy and grief.  Hopefulness and hopelessness.  Light and dark.  

Prologue

by: Marie Howe

In the middle of my life—just past the middle—

walking along the street with our little dog Jack on a leash

—OK—just past the late-middle—

in what some might call early old age,

on a street crowded with children and tourists

my father dead, my mother dead,

my young husband gone from me and grown older (a father

a husband now to someone else),

Jason dead, John dead, Jane and Stanley and Lucy and Lucie

and Billy and Tony and now Richard dead,

I came to the edge

and I did not know that way.

Like Howe, I don’t know the way, either.  Should I just go about writing my pretty poems and turn a blind eye to all the violence and hatred around me?  Or take to the streets, march, raise my voice, stand in the line of fire?  I don’t know what my role is here, except to bear witness, speak the truth.  And I’m not sure that’s enough.

Today was Martin Luther King Day in the United States (regardless of any of #47’s Executive Orders).  We honor the memory of this brave man who did march, raise his voice, stand in the line of fire.  Martin dreamed of a better world, and he did everything in his power to make that dream a reality.  I’m sure, at times, Dr. King lost hope, got pissed.  How could he not, living in a country where racism is as much a part of our history as the Boston Tea Party?  Yet, he never gave up.

One person can make a difference.  Ask Martin.  Or Gandhi.  Or Malcom.  Or Nelson.  Or Mother Teresa.  Or Malala.  Or Dorothy Day.  

That’s my prologue for 2026.  We all need to stand up.  March.  Speak out.  Not lose hope.  If we do all that, we shall overcome.

Saint Marty wrote a poem for today about shoveling snow , , , 

Broken Snow Shovel

by: Martin Achatz

Ten winters, it battled

snow, ice, boulders of earth

hard as iron, storm after flurry

after blizzard after squall.

This morning, a wooden snap,

like a moose crashing through 

deadfall and brush, and its yellow

scoop head lodged in a ridge

of heavy slush, stayed there,

the way mammoths laid down

to nap eons ago, stayed buried

until some farmer plowed up 

their ribs and curled tusks.

January has just begun, several

shoveling months ahead.  I consider

gluing the handle back into

the scoop, taking the chance

it will last until the final flakes

of March or April or sometimes May.

Instead, I leave the scoop stuck,

push more snow over it, erase it

from the white landscape.  When

the waters of spring come, it will

emerge from its grave, remind me 

of this frozen day when I swear 

I see something immense and wooly 

lumbering down my street toward summer.

January 24, 2025: "The Departure," Oppositions, "Twins"

Most relationships are a complicated mix of love and anger, respect and jealousy, joy and grief.  In order to define what joy is, you need to know grief.  To feel love, you have to have some acquaintance with anger or hatred.  That's how the universe works--it's defined by oppositions.

I'm not being profound here.  Many people a lot smarter and more eloquent than me have made the same observation.  You can't have light without darkness.  Sunrise without sunset.  Cold without warm.  Music without silence.  That's how it all works.

Sharon Olds addresses her father . . . 

The Departure

by: Sharon Olds

(to my father)

Did you weep like the Shah when you left?  Did you forget

the way you had had me tied to a chair, as

he forgot the ones strapped to the grille

in his name?  You knew us no more than he knew them,

his lowest subjects, his servants, and we were

silent before you like that, bowing

backwards, not speaking, not eating unless we were

told to eat, the glass jammed to our

teeth and tilted like a brass funnel in the 

soundproof cells of Teheran.  Did you forget

the blood, blinding lights, pounding on the door, as

he forgot the wire, the goad,

the stone tables?  Did you weep as you left

as Reza Pahlevi wept when he rose

over the gold plain of Iran, did you

suddenly want to hear our voices, did you

start to rethink the darkness of our hair,

did you wonder if perhaps we had deserved to live,

did you love us, then?

Sharon Olds' relationship with her father was obviously fraught, as evidenced by this poem.  There was physical and emotional abuse layered on top of alcoholism.  Yet, after her father died, she wrote a collection of poems titled The Father that was all about her love and acceptance of him, recognizing the cycle of drinking and violence that formed him as a person.

I love my wife, but we have struggled a great deal in our time together.  I love my son and daughter, but I haven't always agreed with the life choices they've made.  My dad and I had a complex bond, filled with both love and confusion--me not getting him sometimes, and vice versa.  I love my close friends, but that doesn't mean we see eye-to-eye on every subject.  Far from it.

Yet, if the basis of a relationship is mutual respect and affection, that relationship will thrive.  I will do anything for my family and loved ones.  They know that.  I don't hold grudges.  Life is too short, and, in the end, all the anger and resentment only harms myself.  If the biggest mistake I ever make in my life is loving someone who harms me in some way, I'd count that as a win.

Saint Marty wrote a poem about joy and grief tonight, based on the following prompt from The Daily Poet:

Write a poem about twins where the first and last lines are the same line.  Have the poem be about two of something or two similar events.  As you continue to write, consider objects that come in pairs or images that have something to do with twins (Doublemint gum, pairs of socks, hot and cold faucet handles, etc.)  Write your poem in couplets or have stanzas mirror each other, such as two stanzas of three lines, then two stanzas of five lines.  Feel free to title the poem "Twins" even if your poem isn't directly about two people.

Twins

by: Martin Achatz

for Mary Oliver

You wrote we shake with joy and grief,

both inside us like lungs doing

their sustaining work.  Perhaps they do

eat at the same dinner table, one

liking biscuits and gravy, the other

preferring ham and eggs.  And maybe

they even go for walks, morning, evening,

holding hands, high school sweethearts,

bodies so perfectly suited to each other

they nest in bed at night

like just-washed spoons in a drawer,

still smelling of lemony soap.

I bet they lived next to you, Mary,

neighbors who came over for wine

on New Year's Eve, when everyone

is Janus, gazing backward and forward,

and, at midnight, raised glasses, toasted

all that was, all that is to come.

As they left, trooping through snow

toward home, you watched them from

a window, marveled how you

couldn't tell them apart in the bright

moonlight, then took out your notebook where

you wrote about shaking with joy and grief.

September 13: "Building with Its Face Blown Off," Aunt Marian, Joy and Grief

When looking on a scene of devastation--say a car accident or burned building--I always find myself meditating on the victims and their lives.  How they probably woke up in the morning, just like me, thinking it was going to be a normal day.  Maybe they had oatmeal for breakfast and were planning on returning some books to the library on their way home from work.  Perhaps they made dinner plans with some friends.  Ordinary, boring, everyday stuff.

Until it's not.

Billy Collins writes about heartbreak and loss . . .

Building with Its Face Blown Off

by: Billy Collins

How suddenly the private
is revealed in a bombed-out city,
how the blue and white striped wallpaper

of a second story bedroom is now
exposed to the lightly falling snow
as if the room had answered the explosion

wearing only its striped pajamas.
Some neighbors and soldiers
poke around in the rubble below

and stare up at the hanging staircase,
the portrait of a grandfather,
a door dangling from a single hinge.

And the bathroom looks almost embarrassed
by its uncovered ochre walls,
the twisted mess of its plumbing,

the sink sinking to its knees,
the ripped shower curtain,
the torn goldfish trailing bubbles.

It’s like a dollhouse view
as if a child on its knees could reach in
and pick up the bureau, straighten a picture.

Or it might be a room on a stage
in a play with no characters,
no dialogue or audience,

no beginning, middle and end-
just the broken furniture in the street,
a shoe among the cinder blocks,

a light snow still falling
on a distant steeple, and people
crossing a bridge that still stands.

And beyond that- crows in a tree,
the statue of a leader on a horse,
and clouds that look like smoke,

and even farther on, in another country
on a blanket under a shade tree,
a man pouring wine into two glasses

and a woman sliding out
the wooden pegs of a wicker hamper
filled with bread, cheese, and several kinds of olives.

Billy Collins captures the two sides of tragedy pretty well in this poem.  While he's anatomizing the site of the bombed-out building, a man and woman in another country are sitting down for a romantic picnic.  Life just goes on.

My day was pretty normal.  I worked at the library, worked on my Bigfoot manuscript some, and picked up Border Grill for dinner on the way home.  My wife and I watched an episode of The Crown.  As I was leaving the house to take my puppy for a walk, I got a text from my sister, informing me that our Aunt Marian, my mother's youngest sister, had just died.

I can't say that I was shocked by the news.  A little over a week ago, she suffered a stroke, and then, while she was in the hospital for treatment, the doctors discovered that her body was full of metastatic cancer.  There was really nothing that could be done for her.

Suddenly, my boring evening became a building with its face blown off, if you get my meaning.  For the last few hours, all I've been thinking about is my aunt and what a wonderful, loving person she was.  One of my most vivid memories of her is from a New Year's Eve party at my parents' house, all of us sitting around the dining room table, playing board games into the wee hours of January 1st.  And then I thought of her at home this evening, in bed, breathing those agonal breaths.

Poet Mary Oliver once wrote this:

We shake with joy, we shake with grief.

What a time they have, these two

housed as they are in the same body.

Tonight, Saint Marty is shaking with joy and grief, giving thanks for his Aunt Marian, mourning her loss.