UUABQ Poetry Service: When You Need a Poem

 7/12/2025

Part 1: Be Where You Are

Once poetry has entered your soul, it will always have a place there. Poetry didn’t find a way into my heart in college, though I was a writing and literature major. It was here, right here, as a worship leader in this church, giving voice to beautiful readings handed to me, that poetry started to make its mark. 

There’s nothing like the right poem in the right moment. Today we’d like to share some poems that are friends to us, that call us back to ourselves, or into community, or give us strength to act. 

We’ll start with a few poems that remind us to pay attention, not to the cacophony of the outside world with its politics and emails and endless smartphone distractions, but to what is right in front of you. Or even more intimately, what lives inside of you: That “still, small voice” that can be so hard to hear.

Our first poem may be my very favorite of all time, since Angela chose it for our first Blue December service: Visitation, by Mark Doty.

• Visitation by Mark Doty
• Choice by Lynn Ungar
• The Sound of Me by Kristin Satterlee

Part II: It's All Connected

Poets speak truth to power in hard times. Poets are often trusted voices in the revolution. The political poets that speak to me are those who remind us to keep current events in perspective, not to minimize them, but to remember humility as we decide on how to respond to atrocities. 

The next poems explore this response to unimaginable horror, starting with our place in the grand scheme of things -- our connection to the universe, our moment in time, and our place in the community of ourselves. 

• The Answer by Robinson Jeffers
• Singularity by Marie Howe
• In Any Event by Dorianne Laux

Part III: This Is Hard; You Can Do Hard Things

Suffering comes to each of us: There is no avoiding pain and anxiety, and grief is the price of love. 

So how do we walk through what seems unbearable? No one has the key to that, a one-size-fits all answer. But poetry can remind us that we are not alone; that we can find our way back to life, back to love, back to wholeness.

• The Thing Is by Ellen Bass
• What I Can Do by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Part IV: Building Community

Poets are organizers. They remind us of the collective power of community, of attention, of voice. When I am overwhelmed by all that is wrong, my favorite poets remind me of what’s important to do, step by step, how to reach out to others, how and why we link arms, how to carve out a new future with our love and the power of our laser vision.

• The Space Inside by Mikaela Renz-Whitmore
• Red Brocade by Naomi Shahib Nye
• The Way It Is by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
• Sorrow Is Not My Name by Ross Gay

In Love with the World (poem) by Mark Nepo

There is no end to love. We may tear ourselves away, or fall off the cliff we thought sacred, or return one day to find the home we dreamt of burning. But when the rain slows to a slant and the pavement turns cold, that place where I keep you and you and all of you—that place opens, like a fist no longer strong enough to stay closed. And the ache returns. Thank God. The sweet and sudden ache that lets me know I am alive.

The rain keeps misting my face. What majesty of cells assembles around this luminous presence that moves around as me? How is it I’m still here? Each thing touched, each breath, each glint of light, each pain in my gut is cause for praise. I pray to keep falling in love with everyone I meet, with every child’s eye, with every fallen being getting up. Like a worm cut in two, the heart only grows another heart. When the cut in my mind heals, I grow another mind. Birds migrate and caribou circle the cold top of the world.

Perhaps we migrate between love and suffering, making our wounded-joyous cries: alone, then together, alone, then together. Oh praise the soul’s migration. I fall. I get up. I run from you. I look for you. I am again in love with the world.