Donika Kelly: “The home I’ve been making inside myself started / with a razing”

This poet of the natural world and the mythological world is also a poet of the ordinary.

We are thrilled today to welcome a guest writer to Poetry Buds: Leah Edelman. Leah is a lifetime poetry lover and has written some poems she never shares with anyone. Maybe one day she will! She lives in the Hudson Valley in New York.

by Leah Edelman

Have you ever read a poem and wished you’d written it? Not only because the language is elegant, or the structure is clever, or because there’s an image you can’t stop thinking about… but because it so deeply speaks to your experience, and makes you feel so recognized, that you can't imagine conveying the message any other way?

I can't remember where I first came across Donika Kelly's poem, "The moon rose over the bay. I had a lot of feelings.", but I remember thinking it was perfect, or perfect for me in that moment. (There are two poems by Kelly with this title; the one I love is linked above, as the other poem seems to be more widely available, see links below.)

The first line just spoke to me:

The home I’ve been making inside myself started
with a razing, a brush clearing, the thorn and nettle,
the blackberry bush falling under the bush hog.

Yes, I thought — I'm clearing something out to remake myself, too. And it's work, hard work. And isn't there also a kind of violence required in the process of self transformation, just as in the natural world with seasons of growth and death? Kelly goes on to describe this exactly, and, as I have done, seems to almost mistake the "cycle fallow," to mistake winter, for that being all there is, for nothing else being able to be reborn or rebuilt. But then

Came the thaw, came the melting snowpack, the flooded river,
new ground water, the well risen. I stood in the mud field
and called it a pasture. Stood with a needle in my mouth

and called it a song. Everything rushed past my small ears:
whir in the leaves, whir in the wing and the wood. About time
to get a hammer, I thought. About time to get a nail and saw.

After winter is spring, and the world comes back to life, and we have survived, just like Louise Glück's wild iris (another poet and poem I love dearly, highlighted earlier in this newsletter!). While this is mostly remarked upon without emotion, I can't help but feel a building sense of joy.

First there is a claiming and a renaming (“I stood in the mud field/ and called it a pasture. Stood with a needle in my mouth/ and called it a song”), and then the line, “Everything rushed past my small ears.” How wonderful to feel small amidst the big, comforting everything of nature, that you are part of nature, that you have undergone a natural process. I think this builds the strength to say, “About time/ to get a hammer, I thought. About time to get a nail and saw.” The poem that started with a razing ends with hope and possibility.

This small and compact poem says so much, and says so originally and beautifully what is universal, as the best poems do. How often have we all had to remake ourselves, to evolve? I return to this poem to remind myself that the work is worth it, that there are phases and seasons, and to listen for the “whir in the leaves, whir in the wing and the wood.”

This poem stands alone, but is also the cathartic closing poem of The Renunciations, a book that is a journey of self-rescue, healing, and transformation.

Listen to Donika Kelly read it: https://voca.arizona.edu/track/id/69324

Another poem that stands alone for me, but is also part of a journey in Kelly's book Bestiary (with love poems from chimeras, centaurs, satyrs, minotaurs, mermaids, griffons, and werewolves), is “Love Poem: Centaur.” I love how this poem delights in the physical sensations of love, and how love can give us a new way to see:

I apprehend each flower,
each winged body, saturated in a light
that burnishes.

With those first feelings of love, everything is superlative, everything is THE MOST...

Nothing approaches a field like me. Hard
gallop, hard chest....

... I would make for you
the barest of sounds, wing against wing,
there, at the point of articulation. Love,
I pound the earth for you. I pound the earth.

This poem, in its joyousness, its celebration of the body and of nature and their connectedness, reminds me in a way of Whitman.

Read a variation of the full poem with the same title.

While Donika Kelly is undoubtedly — and again, like Glück — a poet of the natural world and the mythological world, she is also a poet of the ordinary and an expert at saying it like it is, as in this poem: “I Never Figured Out How to Get Free.” This poem speaks for itself and for our times, but also, as I think is one of Kelly's particular talents, could be about any war, global or personal, and the ordinary horror of the way life can carry on amidst other horrors.

To not end on the horror note, I'll share one more poem that touched me, as an introvert with a great need for alone time: “I love you. I miss you. Please get out of my house.” Whereas “Love Poem: Centaur” felt all bravado and early love, this poem is later and calmer, though no less a love poem (How gorgeous is the line, “your scent familiar/ as a thousand evenings”?? How comforting is the line, “What binds us, stretches”??).

Kelly has history and circumstance that she works through in her poetry (and perhaps this is why she has so many poems with the same titles), as you'll quickly understand from reading her books, but to me her poems feel like places I can go to feel seen, too.

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More, please

Donika Kelly is a Professor of English at the University of Iowa, and is the author of Bestiary (Graywolf Press, 2016), The Renunciations (Graywolf Press, 2021), and the forthcoming The Natural Order of Things (Graywolf Press, October 7, 2025), among others.

For those who are curious, the other poem with the same title is here, and you can listen to Donika Kelly read it here:

Listen to Donika Kelly speak about her book Bestiary after it won the Kate Tufts Discovery Award:

Poems by Donika Kelly (Academy of American Poets)

More poems by Donika Kelly (The Poetry Foundation)

Donika Kelly’s website

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Thank you, Leah, for this beautiful spotlight on Donika Kelly.

We’ll see you tomorrow with another poet!

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