A poem-a-day protest against the threat posed to our democracy by the current occupant of the White House and his regime
Sarah Dickenson Snyder
Awakening
Maybe it’s because of my beginning:
my parents’ bed an ocean, the sheets
on the line, nameless clouds.
And when my mother ironed them,
no cleaner scent than hot steam
releasing on cotton.
That’s the bed of my beginning.
Nothing can fully bruise the air—
I awake hopeful, can imagine this morning
printing out Rilke’s sonnet, writing a brief note
imploring the president to read it
and even if he doesn’t picture
the stone torso suffused with brilliance,
he’ll read to the end and feel the alarm
of all he’s unleashed, feel he must
change. Otherwise I live in a photograph
where a sun on the horizon
is only leaving. Otherwise
when I ask my husband
if he’s excited, he won’t respond,
“Not as excited as you are.” Otherwise
we were never the loosening
possibility of goodness.
Sarah Dickenson Snyder is the author of the poetry collections Now These Three Remain (Lily Poetry Review, 2023), With a Polaroid Camera (Main Street Rag, 2019), Notes from a Nomad (Finishing Line Press, 2017), and The Human Contract (Kelsay Books, 2017). Her poems have appeared in One Art, Silver Birch Press, Rattle, Verse Daily, RHINO, and other journals. Snyder lives in Vermont, where she carves in stone and rides her bike.
Indolent Books and editor Michael Broder are back with another poem-a-day series as a creative response to the threat posed to our democracy by the current occupant of the White House. The plan is to continue for all 1460 days of the 47th American presidency.
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