In light of the Coronavirus crisis, please join Poetry Daily for an impromptu series, What Keeps Us.  For the rest of March we will post poems to sustain and uplift through trying times. We thank you for reading and hope that you will share poems with your friends and neighbors. Please be well.
Ross Gay
which today, in the garden,
I’d forgotten
I’d known and more
forgotten
I’d learned and was taught this
by my grandfather
who, in the midst of arranging
and watering
the small bouquets
on mostly the freshest graves
saw my thirst
and cranked the rusty red pump
bringing forth
from what sounded like the gravelly throat
of an animal
a frigid torrent
and with his hands made a lagoon
from which he drank
and then I drank
before he cranked again
making of my hands, now,
a fountain in which I can see
the silty bottom
drifting while I drink
and drink and
my grandfather waters the flowers
on the graves
among which are his
and his wife’s
unfinished and patient, glistening
after he rinses the bird shit
from his wife’s
and the pump exhales
and I drink
to the bottom of my fountain
and join him
in his work.
from the book CATALOG OF UNABASHED GRATITUDE / University of Pittsburgh Press
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"Ben Purkert Reads Jorie Graham"

Ben Purkert joins Kevin Young to discuss "Notes on the Reality of the Self," by Jorie Graham, and his own poem "News." "I don’t find it an easy poem to read or necessarily engage with. But I think it’s really questioning, you know, what is consciousness? What is the self comprised of? Is it matter? Is it material? Or is it something that lives above or outside?"

via THE NEW YORKER
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Cover of The Essential Emily Dickinson

“When I was in high school, I wrote out Emily Dickinson’s “[I started Early—Took my Dog—]” in outsize Goth-y script and taped it to my wall—understanding little of it. I had come across it while doing the dreaded twenty-page research paper for US History, the hallmark assignment of many a college prep school. My teacher was kind. He allowed me to take a patently literary topic and wrench it into a historical one, which is how I found myself leafing through Dickinson’s Collected looking for vaguely feminist poems. This one must have stood out in its forceful expression of utter female power."
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