Books & Poems – Alyssa Bittner-Gibbs

What the Water Knows

There are people whose ethos reach us through a sentence, from many miles away, long after they claimed it. Since this summer, Wendell Berry has been keeping me company. Others may leave a garden, a footpath, a stubborn patch of green that might so easily have become something else. In today’s world, we may struggle to remember that we inherit more than what has gone wrong. We also inherit what humans before us loved enough to keep. So with Berry in mind, I’m trying to think more about life’s quieter bequests. The places that still make room for us. The words that arrive at just the right time. The care we never witnessed, but whose consequences we are able to enjoy. What would it mean to recognise this inheritance while it is still alive, and leave something living in return?

Conduct Your Blooming

Apples, onions, children, and a bucket of dahlias. My worries came home with us, too. As I approach forty-six, a harvest afternoon and the words of Gwendolyn Brooks bring me back to the question of flourishing: what we gather, what we give one another, and what keeps opening in an imperfect world.

Perhaps, Elsewhere

Last year, I wrote that staying was a way of answering. This year, the geese are leaving, and the question has become harder. Through Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese”, I return to belonging, the cost of fighting for a place you love, and the possibility of carrying that love elsewhere.

Worth Beyond Beauty

We bring flowers to one another knowing they will fade, and we plant gardens that may outlast us. Both gestures carry something of the same wish: that there should be beauty in someone’s days, that something we have tended might go on giving pleasure beyond the time we have with it.

Bloom — is Result —

A flower is not merely decoration. In Emily Dickinson’s hands, bloom is result: the visible outcome of timing, endurance, hidden conditions and everything that had to hold before becoming could appear. At Midsommar, her poem arrives for me with thread, inheritance, memory — and the women who left something behind by hand.

Books & PoemsA collection of 5 posts