Tuesday night, March 21
A couple days ago one of our readers wrote asking about a specific poem:
“please remind me who was author of the poem of Kindness, I saved it as a word document failed to acknowledge author.
It has touched me and its part of my journey,”
Her/his request reminds me to remind all 2283 of you that you can find any poet, poem, or word on our permanent archive blog. All 458 posts since the first one are available at https://sites.udmercy.edu/poetry in chronological order (most recent one on top, first one ever, Sept 25, 2013, on the bottom). So to answer this reader’s query about “the author of the poem of Kindness” I went to the archive, wrote “kindness” in the search box, found c. 20 poems that use the word. But, since this was a recent poem, I found it 2nd from the top, easy.
You can do this too.
Here is Naomi Shihab Nye’s compelling poem, “Kindness” again. I’ll use it for today’s post. (n.b., I wrote this about 11:15 Tuesday night. Tomorrow morning I’ll be making coffee for 12 people coming for the Half-day Mission Retreat. Responding to our reader’s question can serve as a reminder of the list’s search tool and at the same time, re-up a wonderful poem only 2.5 weeks since it first appeared. I am reading it as my last thing before saying goodnight to the city. It will be in your mailbox tomorrow morning. 😊)
Sure, it helps to read a strong poem “out loud . . . with pauses”
john sj