Some days don’t require a TBR list filled with grandiose words of encouragement.
Not every experience calls for a tale of love lost and found again or a knight in shining armor. Some moments, we feel under the weather and simply need to be held as we are, exhausted, messy, and curled up with tea and our favorite blanket. And for those times, as always, there is poetry.
Prioritizing your energetic needs and boundaries is always important. But it becomes even more crucial when there isn’t much energy within. Allowing words of ease, patience, and acceptance to sink into our aching bones is a kind of nurturing even some medicines can’t beat. So grab a box of tissues, heating pad, or even a couple cough drops and find soothing through poetry. Give your body the rest it needs and your heart the stillness it craves with these tender poems ahead.
A Sick Day: Offering Soft Support
Down with a quick bug? The writers below are here to offer a hand to hold while asking nothing of you. No heavy lifting required here, simply nourishing and light reads.
- “The Peace of Wild Things” — Wendell Berry
- “Kindness” — Naomi Shihab Nye
- “The Blue House” – Tomas Transtromer
- “Praise Song for the Day” — Elizabeth Alexander
- “When You Come” — Maya Angelou
- “Poem (I lived in the first century of world wars)” — Muriel Rukeyser
Fighting the Flu: Fever Dreams & Creative Comfort
Honoring the flu-induced haze you find yourself in, these poems will accompany this in-between head space in creative ways.
- “The Red Wheelbarrow” — William Carlos Williams
- “Birds Appearing in a Dream” – Michael Collier
- “The Blues” – Langston Hughes
- “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” — Wallace Stevens
- “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” — John Ashbery
For The Long Haul: Endurance for Recoveries
The approach changes when the road grows longer. Endurance and deep understanding is required of you and emphasized through these pieces. Through moments of doubt and hardship, the poems below will be devoted companions.
- “The Thing Is” — Ellen Bass
- “Toast” – by D.A. Powell
- “The Journey” — Mary Oliver
- “What the Living Do” — Marie Howe
- “A Blockhead” — Amy Lowell
- “And Still I Rise” — Maya Angelou
