The poems fulfilling this issue’s theme of rest and recovery feature both the challenging struggles we face from injuries and illnesses of mind and body and the many sources of strength and restoration that help us revive from what ails us. These are the yin and the yang of healthcare: all the ills flesh is heir to and the restoration of our ability to experience life in a more optimal state, or at the least, to persevere, at peace with chronic conditions.

The care we receive from myriad human sources is fully present here. Hospitals and medical technology and expertise are represented in poems by Donny Winter (“A Soluble Tablet”) and Lorelei Bacht (“Cheriton Bishop Hospital, Three a.m.”). In Aremu Adams Adebisi’s “aubade to windbreak,” the speaker laments his brother’s struggle with a life-changing injury to his arm, offering his own love and devotion as a buffer against its social and psychological consequences.

Throughout these works, the solace to be found in the natural world abounds. Speakers find consolation in in flora and fauna, Nature, and the gift of seasons—the timeless cycle that sustains the life of earth. (Though Donny Winter’s “Modern Day Sarcophagus” reminds us that we have a moral, even a political, responsibility to preserve what has been given to us, to ensure the ability of Nature to sustain life.) Jes Burke’s “New York in Spring” amplifies that cyclical power and its joys, while Jonathan B. Aibel’s imaginative speaker in “Life as an Oak, at Recovery” fills our senses with visual, tactile, and kinesthetic images, culminating in “Dig me deep/that my feet can sink into turf,/morel and wood ear, innumerous minutes, a blink of days.” As long as Nature endures, there is hope for humanity. The poem that leads the section, “A Second Pandemic Easter,” by Megan Joiner, a hospital chaplain who served at the front of the COVID-19 pandemic, seems to me a hymn to religious faith associated with the arrival of spring but rooted, above all, in the innocence and steadfastness of children that motivates us to prevail—life’s tenacious durability is a drive embedded deeply, perhaps by instinct, certainly as wisdom gleaned from experience and shared values.

To be human means that sooner or later we will have a personal encounter with physical and mental suffering that will test our ability to cope. As a community and as individuals, we are well advised to prepare for that moment. Poems by Joan Mazza, Eric Roller, and Dameien Nathaniel model what it is like to muster our own determination, our strength of will, to avoid succumbing to the darkness when it arrives, and, instead, to affirm the worth of our individual lives and of our ability to surmount the direst circumstances. The speaker in Mazza’s “My Best Valentine” is fortifying herself:

++++++++++++++++++++++Alone,
I love introspection, reading , play, and rest.
In pandemic time I embrace myself. I’m
steadfast, reliable, my best valentine.

I hope you will savor these poems amid sunny summer days in good health. May you also use their artful insights as potent medicine to face life’s challenges—with courage and with hope for the preservation of humanity and this gift of life on earth.

Steve Granzyk is the poetry editor of Please See Me.