by Laura Parker Roerden
In Honor of National Poetry Month
Poems are psalms,
fairy homes, rivers—exacting places
where words tumble
and fall
out of place
in order to guide us
back in place.
They are vantages, little perches
like a pinnacle of a mountain
or the hollow beneath a rock; they can hold us
as a hawk’s nest or a tossled trough
in a stormy sea—for they are new places
carved as purchase
from where we see ourselves and others.
They click and clack and turn
as interlocking gears that sweep us
into man-made machines so we can,
perhaps,
find our way back into our humanity.
They are shell games, where the sheer will
to train our attention to follow dissolves
the sleight of hand that is (too often) part of living.
They are acts of faith, where meaning
doesn’t neatly align and risks complicating the simple
and simplifying the complex. They are sometimes quietly—
or boldly—broken
to invite our hands to mending.
They are ghosts
that arrive on horseback.
If they are truly adequate poems,
they mirror truth or wholeness
as something we could belong to—
no matter how ugly. They call us to align our hearts
into new wheels of integrity too and extend themselves
as acts of generosity like a stone thrown in a pond
does whatever the laws of physics require it to do.
They unfurl like flags that claim no stake.
They help us to fall in love with mystery
or fences or stones
or the wonderment of one another.
They use words like birds use feathers
to bring us to new country.
© 2025 Laura Parker Roerden. All rights reserved.
Laura Parker Roerden is a writer, teacher and supporter of youth. She is the founding director of Ocean Matters and the former managing editor of Educators for Social Responsibility and New Designs for Youth Development. She serves on the board of Earth, Ltd. and is a member of the Pleiades Network of Women in Sustainability. She lives on her fifth generation family farm in MA.