2024 was a hard year for so many of us, filled with loss. The biggest loss for me was the death of my partner and first reader, Stuart Bartow. All the other losses—two poet friends, two cats, my college, and possibly my country—paled in comparison, but each one knocked me back into my original state of numbed grief. Since I couldn’t write much beyond my free-writing journal in that state, I began to collage poems out of lines I found there. This poem comes from August, when I watched David Attenborough’s “Secret World of Sound,” which inspires the stanza near the end, beginning “Elephants listen for rain with their feet.”

Barbara Ungar’s sixth book, After Naming the Animals, addressing the sixth extinction, appeared in June 2024 from The Word Works, which also published Immortal Medusa and Charlotte Brontë, You Ruined My Life. Prior books include Save Our Ship, which won the Snyder Prize from Ashland Poetry Press, and The Origin of the Milky Way, which won the Gival Poetry Prize. Professor emerita from The College of St Rose, she lives in Saratoga Springs, New York.

W: barbaraungar.net