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Poem: “L’esthétique de la Ville”
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Poem: “When You Pursue Me, World”
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Gazapillo
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Editors’ Picks: God Loves the Autistic Mind
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Editors’ Picks: Damnation Spring
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Editors’ Picks: Life between the Tides
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The Faces of Our Sons
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Remembering Tom Cornell
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Letters from Readers
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Monica of Thagaste, Mother of Augustine
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Covering the Cover: Generations
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A Legacy of Survival
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Daughter of Forgottonia
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Giving Your Children Your Words
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Book Tour: On Being a Good Ancestor
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Ten Theses on Intergenerational Stewardship
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Inheriting Mental Illness
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Yearning for Roots
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Fear of a Human Planet
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Reviving the Village
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Is There a Right to Have Children?
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The Stranger in My House
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The Sins of the Fathers
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My Father Left Me Paperclip
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Decoding the Bible’s Begats
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The Name of My Forty-Sixth-Great-Grandfather
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Somewhere in Chessington
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Singing the Law
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Desiring Silence
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Uncle Albert
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Soldier of Peace
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Two Crônicas
That winter when awareness flies away
and I keep losing keys and cat and mind,
time will be falling, time will fall behind
over and over, dimmer day by day.
Surprise, then, will decide the way of things,
and I won’t bother over what life means.
Youth will revive at times, and playground scenes—
me in the sandbox, friends on slides and swings.
May I at least once find you on the lawn,
lie there, your spry lap holding up my head,
and worship you, since you are ten years dead
and I want to forget that you are gone.
HyunJung Kim, Prayer of a Cicada, gold powder on paper, 2017. Used by permission.
Edward Hamilton
Definitely one for the "I'm not crying, you're crying" file. Hits hardest the first time through, when the ending is unexpected and feels like an abrupt shift in the lighter tone. Interesting to read the poem in my own head first and then hear the recording afterward. I heard the poem in an subdued and nostalgic voice, not the firmer and more forceful one in the reading.