Di Jayawickrema
Never look at the black sun, my grandmother tells my mother. My mother is a child,
my grandmother is still alive. Newspapers warn there is no safe way to view a solar eclipse.
We have no special glasses in Sri Lanka yet. But people must see what they can see.
Some smear soot across their spectacles. Some hold hand-mirrors high. My mother peers
into a basin of water. She tells this story every year I visit, as if for the first time.
In the ripples, the sun looked like the moon, she says. Her voice drifts.
It will be many years before the water touches me.
from the journal ATMOSPHERIC QUARTERLY
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Ada Limón illustration
An Interview with Ada Limón

"I love writing outside. When I’m home in Kentucky, I write on my screened-in porch, that is if it’s warm enough. I love to fill the feeder and watch the birds in between writing lines of poems. Through the years, I’ve trained myself to write anywhere. Planes, hotel rooms — anywhere, really. Though it helps if there is silence. Or sounds of nature."

via THE NEW YORK TIMES
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What Sparks Poetry:
Bret Shepard on "Here But Elsewhere"

"The landscape of my childhood comes back in moments where I confront change....What I experience now pulls on the wild things I experienced earlier in life. The gravel runway for airplanes along the tundra of Atqasuk. The snow piled by machine into a temporary mountain near Ipalook Elementary in Utqiagvik. The sea ice breaking up near the shore of Browerville in time for whaling season."
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