When my husband, Brad, was nineteen years old, he joined the military, hoping to follow in the footsteps of his uncle and grandfather. During his first few weeks at the assigned Air Force base, however, he fell into a deep depression. After a few sessions with the on-base psychologist, he finally realized he was gay and came out. “You know what this means,” the psychologist said. It meant that under the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy, he was soon discharged from the military and sent home. I can only imagine the shame that followed him to the small town in Vermont where he grew up, and where he told no one for years the real reason he’d left the Air Force.
Brad first shared this story with me not long after we moved in together. “Suicide was a daily option,” he said. The idea that this gentle farmer, who uplifts everyone he meets and cares so much for the land, might have ended his life still seems inconceivable to me. Yet what kept him pushing through those dark days, he says, were the small kindnesses offered by neighbors, friends, and customers at the organic farm where he began to work. He would be out for a run or walk, certain that this would be the day he could bear his secret no longer, and someone passing by in their pickup truck would wave, or a friend of the family would stop to ask how he was doing. The weight of his shame became lighter, and he knew he could keep going for another day.
As a lifelong city dweller, I struggled at first with receiving all the caring attention from friends and family in our small community. But after Brad shared his story with me, and then with the whole state of Vermont during his campaign for the US Senate, I soon saw how the daily kindnesses were saving me as well. I felt it when my mother-in-law called if she saw an unfamiliar car in our driveway; when our neighbor Christy would leave mason jars of fresh-pressed apple cider on our side porch; or when my father-in-law would wake early after a nor’easter to plow our driveway. I began to see too that we can create a beloved community like this no matter where we live.
Many of us have faced times when life felt impossible to bear—until a friend texted, or the barista at our favorite coffee shop started chatting with us. Because the sparks of connections like this last for just a few minutes, we might lose heart, believing that what little we can give to each other will have no lasting effect on a world that feels so broken and divided. But my hope is that, as you read through the poems gathered here, you will see kindness not just as a spontaneous act that happens on its own, but as a practice of noticing and naming the many moments of tenderness we witness, give, and receive throughout our days. Over the past year, as I shared these poems with students, family, and friends, I felt profoundly moved by the goodness they seem to prove is our basic human nature. It has become a daily, conscious ritual for me to hold on to as many of my own small kindnesses as possible in what social psychologist Barbara Fredrickson calls “moments of positive resonance.”
These poems retrained me to seek out and find connection at a time when so many of us have grown more isolated. Sometimes a simple hello from someone I passed on the trail in the park or a glimmer in the eyes of a grocery-store cashier was enough to restore my faith in humanity for another day. I began to find ways to be kinder to the people in my own life, too, welcoming the task of helping my elderly mother order groceries online, or sending care packages to friends I hadn’t seen in months. By showing us all the ways we can still practice being together, these poems encourage us to capture and hold on to the moments that matter the most to us in life. Many of the poems included here also model for us the ways that we might let ourselves surrender more fully to joy, especially in service of self-care. In “Ode,” Zoe Higgins uncovers the pleasure of leaving “everything undone” and relieving herself of the constant pressure of the to-do list. And in “Before I gained all this weight,” Molly Fisk shares the desire to go back and shake the girl she once was, awakening her to all the beauty she couldn’t see around her because of shame and fear.
Because a poem contains just a dose of the author’s experience, including the sorrows, pleasures, and struggles all at the same time, it offers us the truest expression of the human condition. If we let it, each poem here can become an invitation to step deeper into our own lives and relationships with others, too. We might read a poem like Christine Kitano’s “For the Korean Grandmother on Sunset Boulevard” and remember that we can find pleasure and kinship even in the simplest observation of a stranger to whom we never speak. Or we might take in the motherly sacrifice at the heart of Ada Limón’s “The Raincoat” and Faith Shearin’s “My Mother’s Van,” and recall the sacrifices our own loved ones made for us, or that we made for others. These poems also urge us toward a deeper relationship with the natural world so that we notice, as January Gill O’Neil does in “Elation,” the way a grove of trees will “claim this space as their own, making the most of what’s given them,” just like we do. I encourage you to use these poems, Reflective Pauses, and Discussion Questions at the end of the book as companions on your own path. Let a poem bring some memory to the surface or follow the call of an opening line or image to some truth of your own, whether you write it down or share it with someone you trust.
Poetry is an ideal tool in times of uncertainty and change in our lives because it grounds us in the now, opening our hearts and minds to the worlds outside and within. Please feel free to share the poems that move you with family and friends, allowing these deeply felt pieces to bring us all closer together until we see, as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. put it so well, that we are all “caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.” Perhaps that’s why, when my husband and I take our daily walks on the roads around our house, we make a point of waving and smiling at every person and every car we pass. We both know all too well that a simple gesture of welcome might change someone’s day and might even save their life.
James Crews