“Singularity (after Stephen Hawking)” by Marie Howe

http://www.mariehowe.com/
https://www.brainpickings.org/2020/04/23/singularity-marie-howe-animated

Poem In Your Pocket Day 2020: "The Map" by Marie Howe

This year for National Poetry Month, Poem In Your Pocket Day is the last day of the month...this is a day when people take a poem with them through their day to share with the world. So let's close out our poetry celebration with a poem that, despite its brevity, speaks to the breathtakingly enormous concept of self, other, and empathy--our very presence in the world. I'm sharing it with you here--and since we are all under some form of quarantine, please consider sharing it virtually. I hope it becomes the ripple in a pond that Howe clearly intended it to be.

The Map
by Marie Howe


The failure of love might account for most of the suffering in the world.

The girl was going over her global studies homework

in the air where she drew the map with her finger


touching the Gobi desert,

the Plateau of Tiber in front of her,


and looking through her transparent map backwards

I did suddenly see,

how her left is my right, and for a moment I understood.

http://www.mariehowe.com/

"The Moment" and "Part of Eve's Discussion" by Marie Howe

In honor of National Poetry Month, I am featuring special poems by special poets each Monday (previously here). Here are two poems, "The Moment" and "Part of Eve's Discussion," by Marie Howe that seem, in essence, to be about the same thing. Poets often work through an idea time and again. I know I have themes and ideas that recur in my own work time and again... and these two poems resonate deeply with my own recurring ideas.


The Moment

Oh, the coming-out-of-nowhere moment

when, nothing

happens

no what-have-I-to-do-today-list


maybe half a moment

the rush of traffic stops.

The whir of I should be, I should be, I should be

slows to silence,

the white cotton curtains hanging still.



Part of Eve’s Discussion

It was like the moment when a bird decides not to eat from your hand,
and flies, just before it flies, the moment the rivers seem to still
and stop because a storm is coming, but there is no storm, as when
a hundred starlings lift and bank together before they wheel and drop,
very much like the moment, driving on bad ice, when it occurs to you
your car could spin, just before it slowly begins to spin, like
the moment just before you forgot what it was you were about to say,
it was like that, and after that, it was still like that, only
all the time.

http://www.mariehowe.com/