Don McKay’s poem “Neanderthal Dig” begins with the discovery of an ancient, child-sized skeleton placed on the wing of a swan and then takes flight, showing us how love and death are riddled with paradoxes — mixing the earthbound and the sacred, the personal and the universal, the time-stamped and the never ending.

Don McKay is the multi-award-winning author of multiple books of poetry, including Lurch, Paradoxides, Strike/Slip (winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize), and Camber: Selected Poems (finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize and a Globe and Mail Notable Book of the Year). McKay has taught poetry in universities across Canada. He currently lives in St. John’s, Newfoundland.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

We’re pleased to offer Don McKay’s poem and invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack newsletter, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen to past episodes of the podcast. We also have two books coming out in early 2025 — Kitchen Hymns (new poems from Pádraig) and 44 Poems on Being with Each Other (new essays by Pádraig). You can pre-order them wherever you buy books.

When dictatorial leaders use talk of peace as a smokescreen to conceal their plans for war and destruction, what are the people to do? Believe in a vision of peace and freedom that is muscular, sturdy, and protective — and pray that it holds, as Ernesto Cardenal does in his poem “Give Ear to My Words (Psalm 5),” translated by Jonathan Cohen.

Ernesto Cardenal (1925–2020) was a Catholic priest and poet who was born in Nicaragua. From 1979 to 1988, he served as the Minister of Culture there. Cardenal was the author of several volumes of poetry, including Pluriverse, Zero Hour, Apocalypse, and In Cuba.

Jonathan Cohen is an award-winning translator of Latin American poetry and a scholar of inter-American literature. He has translated Ernesto Cardenal, Enrique Lihn, Pedro Mir, and Roque Dalton, among others, and his own poems and essays have been widely published. He is the author of pioneering critical works on Pablo Neruda and Muna Lee.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

We’re pleased to offer Jonathan Cohen’s translation of Ernesto Cardenal’s poem and invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack newsletter, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen to past episodes of the podcast. We also have two books coming out in early 2025 — Kitchen Hymns (new poems from Pádraig) and 44 Poems on Being with Each Other (new essays by Pádraig). You can pre-order them wherever you buy books.

Many people say their experience of time changes after they have children, a phenomenon that Diego Báez captures in “Inheritance.” In this poem, a past, present, and future starring the same child shift ceaselessly in a parent’s mind, like photos flipped through in an album, dots placed on a timeline, moments that one wishes they could build monuments for.

Diego Báez, is a writer and educator in Chicago, where he teaches at the City Colleges of Chicago. He earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Rutgers University - Newark. A writer of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, Báez’s work has been published in Freeman's, The Rumpus, The Georgia Review, The Thing Itself Journal, Number Eleven Magazine, and Hobart. His poetry has appeared in Luna Luna, la fovea, Granta, and elsewhere. He serves as a Director of the Board for the National Book Critics Circle and the International David Foster Wallace Society. Báez was an inaugural fellow at CantoMundo in 2010. Yaguareté White, published in 2024 by The University of Arizona Press, is his debut poetry collection.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

We’re pleased to offer Diego Báez’s poem and invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack newsletter, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen to past episodes of the podcast. We also have two books coming out in early 2025 — Kitchen Hymns (new poems from Pádraig) and 44 Poems on Being with Each Other (new essays by Pádraig). You can pre-order them wherever you buy books.