A few weeks ago I saw a hummingbird on my back porch for the first time. It hovered in front of me, just a few feet from my face, as if it desperately wanted to be noticed. I get it, I said aloud. And then I gasped, because it really was so beautiful, shiny and…

On March 15, acclaimed American poet W.S. Merwin died at age 91. Merwin wrote in other genres as well: four prose books, three plays, and twenty volumes of translations of poetry. But it’s for his own poetry that he has long been celebrated. In the 1960s, his poems against the Vietnam War brought him wide…

I was sitting on the bed in my grandma’s studio apartment. My mother and grandmother were on the fancy electronic couch with the motorized recliners and USB ports. We were a little cramped and rather warm because Grandma kept the temperature near 80 degrees. Grandma was crying again.“I keep thinking he’s going to walk through…

“Tell me of despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.” I was in college when I first encountered Mary Oliver. It was in a daily email sent out by one of my philosophy professors. I don’t remember what we had been talking about; maybe we were reading Plato, or Parker Palmer, who said once…

My grandfather’s death came surprisingly quickly, and I witnessed his rapid decline over the three consecutive Sundays leading up to it. On the first Sunday, he was still at home, refusing help when sitting up or adjusting his still powerful body on the bed. Years of throat cancer had left his voice barely audible, but…

“The art of losing isn’t hard to master,” Elizabeth Bishop said, with irony. Still, it’s true that we mislay so many things over a lifetime that we become quite adept at bearing our deprivations. By the end, it’s a wonder that we have so much left to convey; the reading of wills should be bankrupt…

For Kate Keplinger It is the blight man was born for It is Margaret that you mourn for… —“Spring and Fall,” Gerard Manley Hopkins “I’m sorry for your loss,” my friend Dionne posted in response to a note I posted on Facebook. I’d just come back on the redeye from the West Coast that morning, and…

My father: Roy Franklin Harmon, Jr., M.D., passed away on September 22, 2016 at the age of eighty-seven. He was the best man I will ever know. Difficult as it was, my mother wanted me to say something at his funeral service that would at least attempt to encapsulate something of his character. I chose…

For Gregory Wolfe  The following is an excerpt from Meis’s new book Dead People, published June 24 by Zero Books.   Leszek Kolakowski died July 17, 2009. He was a philosopher, a man of letters, historian of ideas. He lived the twentieth century life. It sucked. But like many a Pole, he made the best…