Boulder poet Andrea Gibson weaves together love poetry with entries that explore protests, gun violence, homophobia and even war.
The complexities and depths of human emotion form the foundation of Gibson's latest collection of poetry, "Lord of the Butterflies,". Gibson, who prefers the pronouns they/them/their, talked to Colorado Matters about incorporating anger and humor in their work.
Read Poems From "Lord of the Butterflies"
All The Good In You
When all the good in you starts arguing with all the bad in you about who you really are, never let the bad in you make the better case.
Until We Act
The man asks what I think the US should be doing about Syria and I wonder how to answer that from here—where the planes overhead mean tropical vacations, where looking up is what we do to feel hopeful, not what we do to decide when to tell our children to run from the air, to hide the sunrise of their lungs. My mother never had to teach me that to breathe is to die, so I imagine her hand covering my mouth in the dark of our basement, tasting her palm salted with terror. I imagine because to not imagine is its own missile, its own gas, its own horrid war. I imagine because Syria is 6,677 miles away but would still be called our neighbor if her children were as white as our eyes. I know the white of the eye is the part that does not see. The closest I might ever come to war is the turning of my head. Apathy is intimate, like singing a lullaby to a grenade, then drinking yourself to sleep while it sneaks out the window to explode a boy. I heard there is a town outside of Damascus, years battered by shelling and airstrikes, where a father turned rocket debris into brightly painted swings. Where children build their joy on what aimed for their body’s dust. I heard one girl’s laughter swoops high above the rest, her right hand missing from a missile that hit the market. What do I think we should be doing about Syria? Imagining until we grieve. Grieving until we act like we know what kind of laughter is the sound of the beginning
