What if you lived in a box, in a tree, in a car by the side of the road? What if your shoes were full of rain and mud and you stank like the dog you loved? What if you slept every night in a different ditch, were always cold? What if you had no coat but the coat you'd stolen, rag and wind? What if you kept moving to keep warm and kept warm by burning what you had? What if you bathed in poisoned rivers drank from them, ate their fish? What if you crossed at dusk into a country clamping down? What if they called you Gypsy, nomad, meant: not wanted here? What if they tried to wipe you like a dark stain from the map? What if you lived in a tree, a box, a car? What if you lived?
POETRY FOUNDATION ANNOUNCES 2019 PEGASUS AWARDS WINNERS, MARILYN NELSON AWARDED RUTH LILLY PRIZE On May 7, the Poetry Foundation announced Marilyn Nelson as the winner of the 2019 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the $100,000 prize that annually honors a living US poet for outstanding lifetime achievement. Naomi Shihab Nye won the 2019–2021 Young People’s Poet Laureate, and Terrance Hayes is the winner of the 2019 Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism.
"Rilke’s unpublished missive to a distant beloved became an archetype for much of my sense of the poetic: an epistle (in)to the unknown fueled by a compassion that comprehends radical otherness as an aspect of the self exceeding the self."
![J. Michael Martinez's hand-written version of "[You who have never arrived]"](https://gallery.mailchimp.com/4d91040f019a225461e1f6c57/images/2ee2e312-b6b8-42a5-a4e8-028a80595f0d.jpg)
