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In this week's episode of the Get Lit Minute, your weekly poetry podcast, we spotlight the life and work of poet, Danusha Lam\\xe9ris. She is the author of The Moons of August (Autumn House Press, 2014), selected by Naomi Shihab Nye as the winner of the 2013 Autumn House Press Poetry Prize.\\xa0Source

This episode includes a reading of her poem, "Small Kindnesses,"\\xa0 featured in our 2022/23 Get Lit Anthology.

"Small Kindnesses"

I\\u2019ve been thinking about the way, when you walk

down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs

to let you by. Or how strangers still say \\u201cbless you\\u201d

when someone sneezes, a leftover

from the Bubonic plague. \\u201cDon\\u2019t die,\\u201d we are saying.

And sometimes, when you spill lemons

from your grocery bag, someone else will help you

pick them up. Mostly, we don\\u2019t want to harm each other.

We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,

and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile

at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress

to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,

and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.

We have so little of each other, now. So far

from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.

What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these

fleeting temples we make together when we say, \\u201cHere,

have my seat," "Go ahead \\u2014 you first," "I like your hat."

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