How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope Edited by James Crews

Each of us seeks moments of amazement and joy in our lives. Each of us finds them in different ways. My mother used to lift her face to the sun, or dive into the depths of a nearby lake. My grandmother tended to her rose bushes while her daughter, my aunt, nurtured her herb garden. James Crews has released an amazing anthology of poems to encourage readers to find joy daily. Naomi Shihab Nye has said that this book is for every one of us who welcomes or misses the fullness of joy and the wholeness of days.

In the book’s Foreword, Ross Gay reminds us that we don’t have to turn away from the world to really pause and appreciate it. We don’t have to focus so much on what’s wrong but just be more present to the beauty, the hope, and the gratitude as well. He states:

I have been spending a lot of time lately thinking about witness, about how witness itself is a kind of poetics, or poesis, which means making. By which I mean I have been wondering about how we make the world in our witnessing of it. Or maybe I have come to understand, to believe, how we witness makes our world. This is why attending to what we love, what we are astonished by, what flummoxes us with beauty, is such crucial work. Such rigorous work. Likewise, studying how we care, and are cared for, how we tend and are tended to, how we give and are given, is such necessary work. It makes the world. Witnessing how we are loved and how we love makes the world. Witness and study, I should say. Witness as study, I think I mean.

Truth is, we are mostly too acquainted with the opposite, with the wreckage. It commands our attention, and for good reason. We have to survive it. But even if we need to understand the wreckage to survive it, it needn’t be the primary object of our study. The survival need be. The reaching and the holding need be. The here, have this need be. The come in, you can stay here need be. The let’s share it all need be. [pp. xi and xii]

There are features in this book that encourage participation from the reader: short reflection pauses throughout the anthology in which the editor discusses a selected poem and provides a prompt for writing and reflection; book group questions which also encourage discussion and connection. There are terrific biographies that celebrate each poets’ contributions. But I think it will be the poems that will draw me back to this anthology again and again. That will prompt me to place this one by my reading chair and purchase another for my bedside table. And one for the guest room.

Contributing poets to How to Love the World are from all walks of life and all parts of the US. For example, Lahab Assef Al-Jundi was born and raised in Dasmascus, Syria; Ellen Bass founded poetry workshops at the Salinas Valley State Prison and the Santa Cruz jails; Jo Harjo, born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and member of the Mvskoke Nation, was the first Native American to serve as United States poet laurate; Judith Chalmer was director of VSA Vermont, a nonprofit in arts and disability; Cathryn Essinger lives in Troy, Ohio, where she raises monarch butterflies while Nancy Miller Gomez, now living in Santa Cruz, California, has worked as a stable hand, attorney, and television producer. This diversity convinces me that each of us will find poems that we earmark as our favorites. Here is one of mine by Amanda Gorman.

AT THE AGE OF 18 – ODE TO GIRLS OF COLOR

At the age of 5

I saw how we always pick the flower swelling with the most color.
The color distinguishes it from the rest, and tells us:
This flower should not be left behind.
But this does not happen in the case of colored girls.
Our color makes hands pull back, and we, left to grow alone,
stretching our petals to a dry sun.

At the age of 12

I blinked in the majesty of the color within myself,
blinded by the knowledge that a skinny black girl, a young brown teen,
has the power to light Los Angeles all night,
the radiance to heal all the scars left on this city’s pavement.
Why had this realization taken so long,
when color pulses in all that is beauty and painting and human?
You see, long ago, they told me
that snakes and spiders have spots and vibrant bodies if they are poisonous.
In other words, being of color meant danger, warning, ‘do not touch’.

At the age of 18

I know my color is not warning, but a welcome.
A girl of color is a lighthouse, an ultraviolet ray of power, potential, and promise
My color does not mean caution, it means courage
my dark does not mean danger, it means daring,
my brown does not mean broken, it means bold backbone from working
twice as hard to get half as far.
Being a girl of color means I am key, path, and wonder all in one body.

At the age of 18

I am experiencing how black and brown can glow.
And glow I will, glow we will, vibrantly, colorfully;
not as a warning, but as a promise,
that we will set the sky alight with our magic. [pp. 8, 9]

Thank you to my beautiful daughter for this beautiful gift.

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