"joy still stays joy"

10 May 2026: Just a bit ago, coming in from my walk--a walk filled with Big Thoughts--I finally read a piece my friend sent me that she cut out of the New York Times. By Melissa Kirsch, it commemorates thirty years of "National Poetry Month" (which is April, so yeah...took me a while to get to it). 

Kirsh, like me, is drawn to springtime poems, especially those about April, a month of boomeranging weather contrasts here in the Northeast. She writes, "The internal work is much the same, sitting quietly, paying close attention to the weather inside, you can observe the hope that blows in with the fear, the lightness and heaviness that seem to be competing." Just a really lovely little essay.

The piece ends with some lines from this Jane Hirschfield poem that I have read before and even linked to on New Year's Day. 

This read-through, some different lines caught my attention and some of what was on my mind on my walk: 

"Stone did not become apple. War did not become peace. 

Yet joy still stays joy. Sequins stay sequins. Words still bespangle, bewilder."

"Joy still stays joy," I say to myself, which somehow makes the sadness bearable.