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April 27, 2024

Lullaby for the Grieving

Ashley M. Jones

^{at the Sipsey River}

make small steps.
in this wild place
there are signs of life
everywhere.
sharp spaces, too:
the slip of a rain-glazed rock
against my searching feet.
small steps, like prayers—
each one a hope exhaled
into the trees. please,
let me enter. please, let me
leave whole.
there are, too, the tiny sounds
of faraway birds. the safety
in their promise of song.
the puddle forming, finally,
after summer rain.
the golden butterfly
against the cave-dark.
maybe there are angels here, too—
what else can i call the crown of light
atop the leaves?
what else can i call
my footsteps forward,
small, small, sure?

From You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World (Milkweed Editions, 2024), edited by Ada Limón. Copyright © 2024 Milkweed Editions and the Library of Congress. Used with the permission of the author. Published in Poem-a-Day on April 27, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“I wrote this poem at the Sipsey Wilderness near that same river in Alabama. I didn’t expect to write about my grief process, but it seemed the Wilderness was showing me that my grief for my father was very similar to the difficult hiking path to the river. I’m not an experienced hiker. I was afraid of ticks and injury. This large, all-encompassing grief is new to me, too. I’m afraid, constantly, of its prick and haunt. But there are angels and carriers of light, and I know my dad is one of them now.”
—Ashley M. Jones

Ashley M. Jones, born in Birmingham, Alabama, is the author of REPARATIONS NOW! (Hub City Press, 2021), which was long-listed for the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, and dark//thing (Pleiades Press, 2019), winner of the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize. She is the executive director of the Magic City Poetry Festival and the current poet laureate of Alabama.

You Are Here:
Poetry in the Natural World
(Milkweeds Editions, 2024)

“Edited by Ada Limón, You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World collects fifty previously unpublished poems by some of the United States’ most accomplished poets and reflects on our collective relationship to the natural world.”

About this special edition of Poem-a-Day

Ashley M. Jones’s poem “Lullaby for the Grieving” is featured in Poem-a-Day as part of a National Poetry Month collaboration between the Academy of American Poets, U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón, the Library of Congress, and Milkweed Editions.

“My Father. A Tree.” by Tina Chang
read more

“The Comfort of Darkness” by Galway Kinnell
read more

Thanks to Cyrus Cassells, author of Is There Room for Another Horse on Your Horse Ranch? (Four Way Books, 2024), who curated Poem-a-Day for this month’s weekdays. Read or listen to a Q&A about Cassells’s curatorial approach and find out more about our Guest Editors for the year.

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"Lullaby for the Grieving" by Ashley M. Jones

Lullaby for the Grieving

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