Many of us often struggle with how to live and find joy despite the state of the planet, and this week’s poem, Erin Covey-Smith’s “Maybe,” offers an insight to this challenge. I love this poem’s vulnerability, its intimate and generous voice, and how forthrightly it finds its way to beauty and communion.

With an MFA in printmaking from Concordia University, Covey-Smith found her way to the poetry world via letterpress and book arts. Her poetry appears in the anthologies A Dangerous New World: Maine Voices on Climate Change and The Goose River Anthology, as well as in print and online journals. Her first full-length book of poetry, “Not-Yet Elegies,” was published in 2020.

Maybe

By Erin Covey-Smith

How staidly now I can hear the news:

weather that shuts down power grids,

ousts people from their homes, strands

cars, wrestles down the trees.

(One massive storm that spans the country,

the world – freeze or fire, it’s all the same.)

I hear, and continue making dinner

and think, This is the end.

And it feels like it always feels:

like love.

Because the day ends in a marvel of clouds

alive with light in the dark sky, drifting apart

and waving to the moon – distant,

faultless friend.

I hold my humans more fiercely,

realizing how much we can extract

from days that radiate relentlessly,

even as we slide.

How much can still bear forth,

between and among and after

the storms.
How it might be enough.

Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “Aftermath,” copyright © 2022 by Erin Covey-Smith, appears by permission of the author.