I’m looking out my office window at trees turning colors – red and gold, the stubborn green hanging on till the last moment. My neighbor trots by after her toddler. Another walks a prancing poodle. The mid-autumn sky is dense with clouds, threatening rain, the reality of the season here in the Pacific Northwest. My daughter phones, vents about the rigors of her graduate program. I eye the bills on my desk, the too long to-do list. It’s a quotidian afternoon – non-singular, not worthy of a journal entry or a poem.
Or is it? As we’ve collected these poems of everyday life for you in this issue, our featured poets have led us to notice things that often go unnoticed – scents and sounds and sights, loss and lessons and prayers. Take a moment to sit still in the moment you’re in right now. Settle in and savor the magic of these small moments – walking your child to the morning bus, learning from a tenderhearted son, checking the news, admiring lemons and limes inside lustrous white bowls (“Kitchen Theory” by Alixa Brobbey) or howling at a day when you want to curl up in a ball and just cry [your] face all the way off (“How Are You?” by Susan Jeffers).
These are the memories and moments that make up our lives. We trust this issue’s poems will bring you to renewed attention, to a recommitment to honor the small, vital moments of your own life, from the joyous to the heartbreaking. May you treasure it all!
