Ashes into Dawn Poetry

Your Best

If you always try your best
Then you’ll never have to wonder
About what you could have done
If you’d summoned all your thunder.
And if your best
Was not as good
As you hoped it would be,
You still could say,
“I gave today
All that I had in me.”

~ Barbara Vance

Excerpt from the poetry collection “Suzie Bitner Was Afraid of the Drain”

The Fabulous Dreams by Langston Hughes Spoken Word Poem

The Thing Is By Ellen Bass

to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you’ve held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you down like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.

They ask me why I Write like this Poem

The Human Seasons by John Keats

https://emeraldbookclub.org/2026/01/19/the-human-seasons/

Welcome to Poetic Mondays at the Book Club.

Todays poem is "in the Green by Jessie Rittenhouse"

Welcome to December here at the Poetic Flows Podcast. Stay tuned for poems on winter, rain, celebration, snow and all that December had to bring