Ross Gay is a celebrated contemporary poet known for his emotionally rich and thought-provoking poetry. His work beautifully blends themes of joy, gratitude, nature, and human connection, making his poems both relatable and deeply meaningful. Ross Gay’s writing often transforms simple, everyday experiences into powerful reflections on life, encouraging readers to appreciate small moments of happiness.
One of his most acclaimed poetry collections, Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, won the prestigious National Book Critics Circle Award. This collection highlights his unique ability to explore gratitude even in the presence of pain and loss. His poetic voice is warm, conversational, and filled with emotional depth, making his work accessible to a wide audience.
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| Ross gay |
Ross Gay’s poetry stands out for its focus on mindfulness and appreciation of life’s simple pleasures. His work often reflects themes of gardening, community, love, and resilience. Through his words, readers are reminded to slow down and embrace the beauty around them.
Overall, Ross Gay’s poems offer a refreshing perspective on modern life, blending vulnerability with hope. His writing continues to inspire readers worldwide, making him an important voice in contemporary poetry.
Ending the Estrangement
from my mother's sadness, which was,
to me, unbearable, until,
it felt to me
not like what I thought it felt like
to her, and so felt inside myself—like death,
like dying, which I would almost
have rather done, though adding to her sadness
would rather die than do—
but, by sitting still, like what, in fact, it was—
a form of gratitude
which when last it came
drifted like a meadow lit by torches
of cardinal flower, one of whose crimson blooms,
when a hummingbird hovered nearby,
I slipped into my mouth
thereby coaxing the bird
to scrawl on my tongue
its heart's frenzy, its fleet
nectar-questing song,
with whom, with you, dear mother,
I now sing along.
Love, I'm Done with You
You ever wake up with your footie PJs warming
your neck like a noose? Ever upchuck
after a home-cooked meal? Or notice
how the blood on the bottoms of your feet
just won’t seem to go away? Love, it used to be
you could retire your toothbrush for like two or three days and still
I’d push my downy face into your neck. Used to be
I hung on your every word. (Sing! you’d say: and I was a bird.
Freedom! you’d say: and I never really knew what that meant,
but liked the way it rang like a rusty bell.) Used to be. But now
I can tell you your breath stinks and you’re full of shit.
You have more lies about yourself than bodies
beneath your bed. Rooting
for the underdog. Team player. Hook,
line and sinker. Love, you helped design the brick
that built the walls around the castle
in the basement of which is a vault
inside of which is another vault
inside of which . . . you get my point. Your tongue
is made of honey but flicks like a snake’s. Voice
like a bird but everyone’s ears are bleeding.
From the inside your house shines
and shines, but from outside you can see
it’s built from bones. From out here it looks
like a graveyard, and the garden’s
all ash. And besides,
your breath stinks. We’re through.
Opera Singer
Today my heart is so goddamned fat with grief
that I’ve begun hauling it in a wheelbarrow. No. It’s an anvil
dragging from my neck as I swim
through choppy waters swollen with the putrid corpses of hippos,
which means lurking, somewhere below, is the hungry
snout of a croc waiting to spin me into an oblivion
worse than this run-on simile, which means only to say:
I’m sad. And everyone knows what that means.
And in my sadness I’ll walk to a café,
and not see light in the trees, nor finger the bills in my pocket
as I pass the boarded houses on the block. No,
I will be slogging through the obscure country of my sadness
in all its monotone flourish, and so imagine my surprise
when my self-absorption gets usurped
by the sound of opera streaming from an open window,
and the sun peeks ever-so-slightly from behind his shawl,
and this singing is getting closer, so that I can hear the
delicately rolled r’s like a hummingbird fluttering the tongue
which means a language more beautiful than my own,
and I don’t recognize the song
though I’m jogging toward it and can hear the woman’s
breathing through the record’s imperfections and above me
two bluebirds dive and dart and a rogue mulberry branch
leaning over an abandoned lot drags itself across my face,
staining it purple and looking, now, like a mad warrior of glee
and relief I run down the street, and I forgot to mention
the fifty or so kids running behind me, some in diapers,
some barefoot, all of them winged and waving their pacifiers
and training wheels and nearly trampling me
when in a doorway I see a woman in slippers and a floral housedress
blowing in the warm breeze who is maybe seventy painting the doorway
and friends, it is not too much to say
it was heaven sailing from her mouth and all the fish in the sea
and giraffe saunter and sugar in my tea and the forgotten angles
of love and every name of the unborn and dead
from this abuelita only glancing at me
before turning back to her earnest work of brushstroke and lullaby
and because we all know the tongue’s clumsy thudding
makes of miracles anecdotes let me stop here
and tell you I said thank you.
Thank You
If you find yourself half naked
and barefoot in the frosty grass, hearing,
again, the earth's great, sonorous moan that says
you are the air of the now and gone, that says
all you love will turn to dust,
and will meet you there, do not
raise your fist. Do not raise
your small voice against it. And do not
take cover. Instead, curl your toes
into the grass, watch the cloud
ascending from your lips. Walk
through the garden's dormant splendor.
Say only, thank you.
Thank you.
The Truth
Because he was 38, because this
was his second job, because
he had two daughters, because his hands
looked like my father's, because at 7
he would walk to the furniture warehouse,
unload trucks 'til 3 AM, because I
was fourteen and training him, because he made
$3.75 an hour, because he had a wife
to look in the face, because
he acted like he respected me,
because he was sick and would not call out
I didn't blink when the water
dropped from his nose
into the onion's perfectly circular
mouth on the Whopper Jr.
I coached him through preparing.
I did not blink.
Tell me this didn't happen.
I dare you.
Bringing the Shovel Down
Because I love you, and beneath the uncountable stars
I have become the delicate piston threading itself through your chest,
I want to tell you a story I shouldn’t but will, and in the meantime neglect, Love,
the discordant melody spilling from my ears but attend,
instead, to this tale, for a river burns inside my mouth
and it wants both purgation and to eternally sip your thousand drippings;
and in the story is a dog and unnamed it leads to less heartbreak,
so name him Max, and in the story are neighborhood kids
who spin a yarn about Max like I’m singing to you, except they tell a child,
a boy who only moments earlier had been wending through sticker bushes
to pick juicy rubies, whose chin was, in fact, stained with them,
and combining in their story the big kids make
the boy who shall remain unnamed believe Max to be sick and rabid,
and say his limp and regular smell of piss are just two signs,
but the worst of it, they say, is that he’ll likely find you in the night,
and the big kids do not giggle, and the boy does not giggle,
but lets the final berries in his hand drop into the overgrowth
at his feet, and if I spoke the dream of the unnamed boy
I fear my tongue would turn an arm of fire so I won’t, but
know inside the boy’s head grew a fire beneath the same stars
as you and I, Love, your leg between mine, the fine hairs
on your upper thigh nearly glistening in the night, and the boy,
the night, the incalculable mysteries as he sleeps with a stuffed animal
tucked beneath his chin and rolls tight against his brother
in their shared bed, who rolls away, and you know by now
there is no salve to quell his mind’s roaring machinery
and I shouldn’t tell you, but I will,
the unnamed boy
on the third night of the dreams which harden his soft face
puts on pants and a sweatshirt and quietly takes the spade from the den
and more quietly leaves his house where upstairs his father lies dreamless,
and his mother bends her body into his,
and beneath these same stars, Love, which often, when I study them,
seem to recede like so many of the lies of light,
the boy walks to the yard where Max lives attached to a steel cable
spanning the lawn, and the boy brings hot dogs which he learned
from Tom & Jerry, and nearly urinating in his pants he tosses them
toward the quiet and crippled thing limping across the lawn,
the cable whispering above the dew-slick grass, and Max whimpers,
and the boy sees a wolf where stands this ratty
and sad and groveling dog and beneath these very stars
the boy brings the shovel down
until Max’s hind legs stop twitching and his left ear folds into itself,
and the unnamed boy stares at the rabid wolf whose wild eyes loll white in his head,
taking slow steps backward through the wet grass and feels,
for the first time in days, the breath in his lungs, which is cool,
and a little damp, spilling over his small lips, and he feels,
again, his feet beneath him, and the earth beneath them, and starlings
singing the morning in, and the somber movement of beetles
chewing the leaves of the white birch, glinting in the dark, and he notices,
Darling, an upturned nest beneath the tree, and flips it looking for the blue eggs
of robins, but finds none, and placing a rumpled crimson feather in his mouth
slips the spindly thicket into another tree, which he climbs
to watch the first hint of light glancing above the fields, and the boy
eventually returns to his thorny fruit bush where an occasional prick
leaves on his arm or leg a spot of blood the color of these raspberries
and tasting of salt, and filling his upturned shirt with them he beams
that he could pull from the earth that which might make you smile,
Love, which you’ll find in the fridge, on the bottom shelf, behind the milk,
in the bowl you made with your own lovely hands.
