Poetry Unbound

Some words about change

and the changes change contains

Pádraig Ó Tuama

May 31, 2026

Dear friends,

Your pantoums last week were glorious. I should write a 256-line pantoum, 16x16, about the experience of reading them. Thank you — for responding with such generosity and for engaging with each other with such generosity.

A few days ago, we released an episode of Poetry Unbound in Conversation where I interviewed the Palestinian American poet Fady Joudah (who is also a medical doctor). The conversation happened when he was presented the 2024 Jackson Poetry Prize in front of an audience in New York, hosted by the very good people of Poets & Writers magazine. What he says is poetic, personal, political, and powerful, and I urge you to listen.

A term I’ve written about a lot is “volta” — which means “turn” in Italian and from which we get the words “revolve” or “revolution”. In a poem, it’s where a turn occurs: everything is going one way, and then it turns. So much art, whether it be a film, a book, a poem, a suite of music, builds on the volta, where an expectation is established only for it to head in a different direction.

Here’s a poem I published recently. There was a grief I’d been trying to write about and when — finally — the pathway to write about it arrived, it arrived because I knew that it was only the doorway to another poem.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

Our Lady of the Garden

i.m. Paula Merwin

All this time, I felt like I had to describe
 the things I did, and what was done to me,
 how I had to wander a strange world for years,
 needing to be busy, sleeping in strange beds,
 searching through cities for chapels to weep in,
 learning the stitches that keep a ripped heart
 together for a while, when what I really need
 to say is that it rained all night and morning,
 and the drops were a percussion on the trees,
 and after the sun rose, I saw an insect land on the railing
 and take shelter, and a bird drank from a leaf.
 Wild pigs exploded from the bushes where they’d hid,
 and the sage in the bowl smelt of memory and musk.
 A toad sat — still as any god — on the wet stone.

Originally published on Poem-A-Day; in my forthcoming collection Love Between Men

At the heart of the volta is change. And even with an anticipated change, like when sorrow gives way to something else, there can be resistance: I can miss the sorrow I said I wanted to move on from. We know this in griefs of our lives too. And one of the things from my training in conflict resolution was how some parties to a conflict can upset the possibility of resolution just before it’s achieved, because they cannot bear to imagine a life without the conflict they’re in (this is especially true for situations where we have been complicit in creating the conflict). A poem is a little vessel that can explore change, and as such, it can worm its way into the ambivalent hearts of humanity. To study our relationship to change is to study our relationship to living, I think. It reveals the politics and particulars of our differing lives.

So, that’s the question this week, friends: When have you resisted change? What happened then? What helped in your resistance, or did your resistance give way to something else? And if it did, what happened to your resistance? Was that an avenue of relief? Or grief? Or something else?

I look forward to reading your stories of change and resistance.

PS: For those of you in the Chicago area — or those who live elsewhere and enjoy taking online tours of art museums — I was thrilled to contribute, alongside Marielle Epstein and others, a few reflections to the Art Institute of Chicago’s permanent exhibition. You can ask for the audio tour when you visit, or you can watch and listen to the full tour here.