Summer Poetry | Call for Essays and Other Works | New Spirit, Wise Action
July 16, 2019 Kosmos Community News


Summer Gallery of Poets

This summer’s bouquet of poems is gathered by our Poetry Editor, Carolyn Martin. Enjoy poems by Alix Anne Shaw, Elizabeth Kerlikowske, Mimi Jennings, and Stephanie L. Harper.


The Gift of Tears

By Margaret Miller
In the 2019 Summer edition of Kosmos Quarterly

“Poetry…has the capacity to bring forth ‘the gift of tears’. It is, therefore, the urgent job of poets and other writers to find the language that can embrace our reality and reveal the magnificence of the world that we are losing. Whether we are able to give adequate expression to the catastrophe we are now experiencing is an open question, but, for Christie, even the possibility of being morally honest in our relationship with the natural world is difficult to imagine if we do not at least try to give voice to these losses.”


Captives of Our Desire

A Kosmos Gallery
by Kathy Whitham

Our idealized, nostalgic image of farm life has been expressed in Hellenistic paintings, the Renaissance and through the centuries until today. We still apply a ‘pastoral ideal’ to the food we eat. These romanticized portraits of farm animals challenge us to confront each animal eye-to-eye. First, to recognize the beauty of the individual, then to consider this encounter in the context of the anonymous cruelty of factory farming, and finally to consider our relationship to animals as ‘meat, dairy, and eggs’.