Poetry by Dana Wildsmith
Dana Wildsmith is the author of six books of poetry, with a new collection, Good Ghosts, forthcoming in 2026. Wildsmith’s novel, Jumping, examines border issues through the lives of characters based on her interviews with immigrants who entered the U.S. without documentation. Her environmental memoir, Back to Abnormal, was Finalist for Georgia Author of the Year. Wildsmith has served as Artist-in-Residence for Grand Canyon National Park and Everglades National Parks. She is on the editorial staff of PMS&G, a literary journal. She is a Fellow of The Hambidge Center. For her day job, she teaches English to non-native English speakers with Lanier Technical College.
Blessings
This cloister
walled by my desk lamp’s light,
ceiled by the last dark of waning night,
one early hour to shuffle words
toward whatever this pragmatic Methodist
might deem enlightenment.
Early in the garden.
Same rabbit, different gap in the fence,
same misapprehension
of his rump’s girth.
I, the one he was trying to avoid,
blessed by the excuse of kindness
to touch his downy wildness,
folding his flailing legs into the opening
and giving his butt a shove.
My child,
born while I was still a child
but somehow knowing
I’d need her steady stepping
through a world she keeps in order
for us both.
Lunch with friends
who’ve logged miles and years with me,
traveling toward each Sunday brunch
with nothing needing to be said,
and never enough time
to say it all.
This dog,
who did not flinch from my side
when two arrogant half-wits
(which recent politics has shown us
is the deadliest of combinations)
equated pushing a four-wheeler’s pedal
with power
and aimed for me.
No power
after winds whirled through
just as the night settled in.
I opened the doors for air
and fell asleep on the sofa
waiting for power
and woke to a deepening night
sighing into the cool of one a.m.,
adjusting the world’s thermostat
at its own will.
My sister of the heart.
Through the years of her husband’s
long goodbye,
I would from time to time
hear her heart’s call to no one, everyone,
and I would answer by calling her.
Today she heard my own ring of despair
across two states
through love’s boundless signal
and called me back.
Three aging cats
who defaulted to me
when Mama died.
Holding them
lets me
almost
touch her.
Having someone in my life
who knows
the one more thing
and yet another thing
that might crumple
my endurance.
Having someone who understands
the why of the more obvious what.
Ritual:
a cup of black tea for waking,
a cup of green for entering the day.
A certain mug for each day.
These days, the cat mug
I’ve always saved for special
comes down from the shelf
more and more often,
as I try to trick another relentless day
into being special.
This poet’s call to prayer
each day before the day
grows frantic with noise
and all I hear
are the oughts.
This peace of place.
One moment of me.
The Gracious Anonymity of Woods
Wind blew the door open, so I went in
where loblollies swayed
like grannies unsteady in the sauna,
catching each other
shoulder to slippery shoulder—
eeeee, honey—
groaning their backs straight,
then the shrill bending again.
I am among them, not of them.
They take no more notice of me
than any small creature
they might finally collapse on,
or not. This is what I have needed:
to watch
how they bow and recover,
how they bend and snap back.
II.
When I go into the woods to sing,
the trees absorb my words.
They’re not listening, but accepting,
like the rain that comes, or snow.
That’s fine with me.
I sing to find a tempo for my troubles,
a walking pace to take me up the hill
where my dog and I can rest
among the placidly abiding trees.
III.
Mid-concert, a drummer friend felt chest pains
building tempo, a solo riff on his increasing years
and dubious history. He eyed the festival’s medical tent,
then shook his head. Nah. If he had to go,
no better way than blast-beating
to the end of the song, the end of his gig.
I think of him when I walk my woods
mid-storm, winds howling the passion
of their power, trees dervishing,
and me, preferring to end my long ramble,
if end it I must,
where I am most alive.
Finding the Recording, Twenty Years On
Not the three of us singing, but
the instant while our final note
was dying away, when Mama spoke--
We make a fine trio– was enough
to ruin me, her voice a gust
of what had been her before her mind
began its last amen.
Twenty years drift down to dust.
I offer my recent past as forfeit
to have her back to let her go.