☀ Today's Poem: "The Inventors" Arielle Hebert

Today's Headline: Ishion Hutchinson on Les Murray

April 25, 2025 The Inventors Arielle Hebert What will we think of next? Even paradise was invented, perfect garden surrounded by high walls, rusty nails upholding the big gate’s NO TRESPASSING sign. The cookie-cut homes, ageless neighbors, flowers that will never know the dirt of graves. But everything has its opposite— we invented that, too. The other side of the fence, in the cold, where we cover ourselves in skins of dead animals, sharpen our daggers, and want. History will say it was the engine of envy that drove us off the cliffs of discontent. Not the ache in a mother’s breast as she buries another child, bells of laughter no longer cresting from the crib. No. They’ll look at our knees and think, How filthy. From their towers, they’ll joke how small we seem. Like ants. Even our language separates us. We both have a word for water, but paradise does not know the word drown. They heard us singing and did not notice the silhouette on the pyre. They eyed us dancing under June’s full moon and said, They must be happy. Who can blame them for believing what they saw? Bodies holding each other in the night, against the darkness. I have no excuse. I was there, and I was also dancing. from the journal SOUTHERN HUMANITIES REVIEW READ ABOUT TODAY'S POEM Share Tweet Forward This poem is an attempt to resist elitism and embrace humanity. I drafted this in a Sunday writing group where we would each share some words from whatever we were reading, then we would mute ourselves and write a poem mining the list. One of the words that Sunday was “paradise.” I thought about how the existence of paradise meant the existence of non-paradise, how that parallels our real power structures, and on which side of the fence I want to be. Arielle Hebert on "The Inventors" Celebrate National Poetry Month with Our Readers “Loving something can save you . . .” "That’s the surprise truth that bursts open in the middle of Bill Brown’s poem, 'With the Help of Birds.' But who would have guessed it would be birds that could teach us how to live, how to love? Who would know that birds could save us from the 'great mundane,' the lock of drudgery, the pall of days that spreads its shroud of tedium, of grief, of loneliness, of meaningless to-do lists?" K. Martha Sprano Levitt READERS WRITE BACK "Ishion Hutchinson on Les Murray’s Sensory, Mozartian Poems" "The triumph of Murray is that he takes the classical music—meter and rhyme—out into the open, back into the environment, and exposes it to the tumult of sun. Not as a nature poet or a shaman-farmer—big machineries quake frequently in his poems, none greater than the scudding, luxuriant 'Machine Portraits with Pendant Spaceman'—but simply by being the leviathan within that word-hoard of “life-enhancing sprawl / that require[s] style.”" viaLITHUB READ ALL TODAY'S HEADLINES donate View in browser You have received this email because you submitted your email address at www.poems.com. If you would like to unsubscribe please click here. © 2025 Poetry Daily, Poetry Daily, MS 3E4, 4400 University Dr., Fairfax, VA 22030 Design by the Binding Agency

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