My favorite poems are the ones that make the most ordinary things of life seem like the most special, noteworthy, extravagant.

There’s something that really shocks me, every time, about a poem that takes the simple things—eating an orange, the interior of an apartment, a conversation over dinner, a walk along the river—and makes them the biggest things. The often-overlooked signals to the beyond.

These poems function as a sort of offering, and window into how you might be able to see the world, if only you’d pay more attention.

I’ve been struggling to pay attention, that’s for sure. And when I read one of these poems, I’m reminded about the magic that can exist right where I am.

The things that make up your life can also be the things that make you feel most alive.

Here are a few poems that demonstrate what I’m taking about:

The Orange
By Wendy Cope

At lunchtime I bought a huge orange—
The size of it made us all laugh.
I peeled it and shared it with Robert and Dave—
They got quarters and I had a half.

And that orange, it made me so happy,
As ordinary things often do
Just lately. The shopping. A walk in the park.
This is peace and contentment. It’s new.

The rest of the day was quite easy.
I did all the jobs on my list
And enjoyed them and had some time over.
I love you. I’m glad I exist.

The Cabbage
By Ruth Stone

You have rented an apartment.
You come to this enclosure with physical relief,
your heavy body climbing the stairs in the dark,
the hall bulb burned out, the landlord
of Greek extraction and possibly a fatalist.
In the apartment leaning against one wall,
your daughter’s painting of a large frilled cabbage
against a dark sky with pinpoints of stars.
The eager vegetable, opening itself
as if to eat the air, or to speak in cabbage
language of the meanings within meanings;
while the points of stars hide their massive
violence in the dark upper half of the painting.
You can live with this.

VI (from Sabbaths 2001)
By Wendell Berry

The question before me, now that I
am old, is not how to be dead,
which i know from enough practice,
but how to be alive, as these worn
hills still tell, and some paintings
of Paul Cezanne, and this mere
singing wren, who thinks he’s alive
forever, this instant, and may be.

These poems are how I want to write poems. The sharing of an orange, a child’s painting, a bird’s song, all signaling to life itself.

My task this week is to locate the things in my life that speak to aliveness.

Today, I saw it in the way my yard glowed with a warm green following the afternoon rain, it looked otherwordly. I felt it when I’d returned home after a morning at the beach, my sandy baby playing with a toy and talking in the other room, the most content she could be, after dipping her toes in Lake Michigan for the first time in her life. It was there in the kind cart handoff in the Aldi parking lot and the taste of a fresh lettuce from the garden.

These are some of the things I imagine I’ll be writing about this week.

As I near the end of my residency, I plan to use the next two Mondays to share more of my writing and conclude my Writer in Residence blog posts with one final prompt on the 30th.

Before then, if you’ve written any place-based poems about your life lived in Racine that you’d like to be considered for publication, send them my way sooner rather than later. My email is sklblauren@gmail.com. I’ll be getting to work on the anthology soon, so please, get your poems to me! I look forward to reading them.

Happy Monday,
L.A. Sklba