Poems to save the world
"In the very end, civilizations perish because they listen to their politicians and not to their poets."
— Jonas Mekas
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about how to save the world.
I know this sounds a little dramatic, but honestly, I don’t think I’m alone here. Everywhere I look, I see good people doing what they can to save the world. And to be clear, I’m not talking about people saving themselves or their families, I’m talking about regular everyday people fighting for what is right—for other people, often strangers. So many good people generously sharing their precious resources—their time and money and talents—to heal and to help, to educate and advocate, to protest and to protect—other people.
You can call it humanity or community or compassion but at the end of the day, it begins with simply seeing and understanding the ways we are all connected—the ways we are all intricately stitched together—and then acting on that understanding. This is the most vital work of our time.
This work starts with attention, I think, and this is where the idea of poetry’s singular value comes in. Poetry does many interesting things, but at its most essential level, poetry invites us to look closely at something and to consider it in a different way. In doing this, poetry can expand our awareness, clarify our understanding of something complex or complicate our understanding of something simple. It can help us to find our common ground and to understand the ways in which our personal experiences and struggles as humans beings are not so different than the personal experiences and struggles of other human beings. It can move and inspire us, inflame and incite us and very often, help us to see something in an entirely new light.
My all-time favorite poet, Mary Oliver, wrote eloquently about the way good poems amplify and distill the spectacular beauty of the natural world and also help us to cope with life’s inevitable losses: “Poetry is a life-cherishing force. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.”
Other writers and thinkers have suggested that poetry has the unique ability to help us see beyond our own self-interest and in doing so, unlock our humanity. The late poet, Allen Ginsberg suggested that “the only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That's what poetry does.” President John F. Kennedy also understood poetry to have a profound ability to shift our perspective and suggested that it could actually mitigate the worst instincts of mankind and remind leaders of their own small place in the order of things: “When power leads men towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.”
And, finally, one of the seminal poets of the 20th century, Dylan Thomas, expounded on the profoundly existential value of poetry: “A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape of the universe, helps to extend everyone's knowledge of himself and the world around him.”
As a daily reader and sometimes-writer of poems, every single one of these quotes resonates deeply with me. I guess that is why, this week, as I was digesting the terrible news of the day, I was struck by the fact that the 37-year-old woman murdered by an ICE agent in Minneapolis last Wednesday, Renee Nicole Good, was not only a mother and a citizen, but she was also a poet. I immediately searched for her poem, which had been awarded the prestigious Academy of American Poet’s Prize. What I found was a beautiful and poignant poem—a poem that I most likely would never have read, but for the tragic circumstances of her death. This, of course, made me want to share it here and, as I was doing that, a couple of other favorite poems bubbled up in my consciousness. So, here is my small collection of beautiful poems—poems that may have saved me at different moments in my life—and poems that might just save the world, given the chance.
On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs
by Renee Nicole Good
i want back my rocking chairs,
solipsist sunsets,
& coastal jungle sounds that are tercets from cicadas and pentameter from the hairy legs of cockroaches.
i’ve donated bibles to thrift stores
(mashed them in plastic trash bags with an acidic himalayan salt lamp—
the post-baptism bibles, the ones plucked from street corners from the meaty hands of zealots, the dumbed-down, easy-to-read, parasitic kind):
remember more the slick rubber smell of high gloss biology textbook pictures; they burned the hairs inside my nostrils,
& salt & ink that rubbed off on my palms.
under clippings of the moon at two forty five AM I study&repeat
ribosome
endoplasmic—
lactic acid
stamen
at the IHOP on the corner of powers and stetson hills—
i repeated & scribbled until it picked its way & stagnated somewhere i can’t point to anymore, maybe my gut—
maybe there in-between my pancreas & large intestine is the piddly brook of my soul.
it’s the ruler by which i reduce all things now; hard-edged & splintering from knowledge that used to sit, a cloth against fevered forehead.
can i let them both be? this fickle faith and this college science that heckles from the back of the classroom
now i can’t believe—
that the bible and qur’an and bhagavad gita are sliding long hairs behind my ear like mom used to & exhaling from their mouths “make room for wonder”—
all my understanding dribbles down the chin onto the chest & is summarized as:
life is merely
to ovum and sperm
and where those two meet
and how often and how well
and what dies there.
For Renee Nicole Good Killed by I.C.E. on January 7, 2026
by Amanda Gorman
They say she is no more,
That there her absence roars,
Blood-blown like a rose.
Iced wheels flinched & froze.
Now, bare riot of candles,
Dark fury of flowers,
Pure howling of hymns.
If for us she arose,
Somewhere, in the pitched deep of our grief,
Crouches our power,
The howl where we begin,
Straining upon the edge of the crooked crater
Of the worst of what we’ve been.
Change is only possible,
& all the greater,
When the labour
& bitter anger of our neighbors
Is moved by the love
& better angels of our nature.
What they call death & void,
We know is breath & voice;
In the end, gorgeously,
Endures our enormity.
You could believe departed to be the dawn
When the blank night has so long stood.
But our bright-fled angels will never be fully gone,
When they forever are so fiercely Good.
Tired
by Langston Hughes
I am so tired of waiting,
Aren't you, For the world to become good
And beautiful and kind?
Let us take a knife And cut the world in two-
And see what worms are eating
At the rind.
The Peace of Wild Things
by Wendell Berry
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
Love Letter from the Afterlife
Andrea Gibson
My love, I was so wrong. Dying is the opposite of leaving. When I left my body, I did not go away. That portal of light was not a portal to elsewhere, but a portal to here. I am more here than I ever was before. I am more with you than I ever could have imagined. So close you look past me when wondering where I am. It’s Ok. I know that to be human is to be farsighted. But feel me now, walking the chambers of your heart, pressing my palms to the soft walls of your living. Why did no one tell us that to die is to be reincarnated in those we love while they are still alive? Ask me the altitude of heaven, and I will answer, “How tall are you?” In my back pocket is a love note with every word you wish you’d said. At night I sit ecstatic at the loom weaving forgiveness into our worldly regrets. All day I listen to the radio of your memories. Yes, I know every secret you thought too dark to tell me, and love you more for everything you feared might make me love you less. When you cry I guide your tears toward the garden of kisses I once planted on your cheek, so you know they are all perennials. Forgive me, for not being able to weep with you. One day you will understand. One day you will know why I read the poetry of your grief to those waiting to be born, and they are all the more excited. There is nothing I want for now that we are so close I open the curtain of your eyelids with my own smile every morning. I wish you could see the beauty your spirit is right now making of your pain, your deep seated fears playing musical chairs, laughing about how real they are not. My love, I want to sing it through the rafters of your bones, Dying is the opposite of leaving. I want to echo it through the corridor of your temples, I am more with you than I ever was before. Do you understand? It was me who beckoned the stranger who caught you in her arms when you forgot not to order for two at the coffee shop. It was me who was up all night gathering sunflowers into your chest the last day you feared you would never again wake up feeling lighthearted. I know it’s hard to believe, but I promise it’s the truth. I promise one day you will say it too– I can’t believe I ever thought I could lose you.
The World Is A Beautiful Place
by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
The world is a beautiful place
to be born into
if you don't mind happiness
not always being
so very much fun
if you don't mind a touch of hell
now and then
just when everything is fine
because even in heaven
they don't sing
all the time
The world is a beautiful place
to be born into
if you don't mind some people dying
all the time
or maybe only starving
some of the time
which isn't half bad
if it isn't you
Oh the world is a beautiful place
to be born into
if you don't much mind
a few dead minds
in the higher places
or a bomb or two
now and then
in your upturned faces
or such other improprieties
as our Name Brand society
is prey to
with its men of distinction
and its men of extinction
and its priests
and other patrolmen
and its various segregations
and congressional investigations
and other constipations
that our fool flesh
is heir to
Yes the world is the best place of all
for a lot of such things as
making the fun scene
and making the love scene
and making the sad scene
and singing low songs and having inspirations
and walking around
looking at everything
and smelling flowers
and goosing statues
and even thinking
and kissing people and
making babies and wearing pants
and waving hats and
dancing
and going swimming in rivers
on picnics
in the middle of the summer
and just generally
'living it up'
Yes
but then right in the middle of it
comes the smiling
mortician
Wild Geese
by Mary Oliver
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
