In a world that pulls you in every direction, feeling disconnected is real. Through original poetry, essays, and craft insights, each themed issue helps readers reconnect...with themselves, their stories, and the world around them.
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The Endurance Issue
Published about 1 month ago • 4 min read
February 28, 2026
A Surprise in the Shrublands, Symbols That Carry On, Endurance in Exile, and More.
Welcome to The Endurance Issue. At the center is my poem A Surprise in the Shrublands, which reflects on what it means to stay present when risk sharpens the senses and survival feels shared. For me, endurance lives less in force and more in attention.
This issue also unpacks metonymy, a figure of speech in which a part stands for the whole. From Shakespeare’s “lend me your ears” in Julius Caesar to landscapes and objects in poetry, it carries complex ideas and emotions in an enduring image.
I also pause on exile, memory, and John Montague’s work. In The Rough Field, survival comes from naming what is broken without leaving it behind.
What is so cold about a lone howl as I pass through shrubland grounds? A sun trails orange and purple above; the coyote, I cannot locate by sound. An authority over noisy beasts, singing across ranch pastures west, manipulating jowls to warn of danger, clipping away yips of distress. But the evening has presented an enemy of my enemy, as death enters with a growl. Why, then, do I wait with hairs standing on end as a ghost cat nearby purrs and prowls? A cold wind snuffs out our candle. Brittle browse under foot fades to black. In this ancient game, senses do not choose to turn in or turn back. Will tomorrow hold my story up to the light of past lives? Will I return to these undisturbed grounds? Tonight I am alive, rifle across my back, at a point and a place hardly found on a map, hunter and the hunted on common ground.
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Devices
Metonymy
Metonymy is a figure of speech in which something is referred to by a closely related object, idea, or attribute rather than by its own name. For example, saying “the crown” to mean a king or queen uses metonymy. I find that in John Montague's work below, the fields, his township of Ulster, and even crows act as metonyms for displacement, memory, and survival. By focusing on these parts, poems can convey endurance. This device allows writers and poets to convey complex ideas or emotions through a single, concrete image.
“Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears." Here, ears is used metonymically to mean attention rather than literal organs of hearing. Shakespeare compresses the speaker’s appeal into a single, vivid image. The metonym endures beyond the moment of the speech.
— William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act 3, Scene 2
On this day in 1909, John Montague was born in Brooklyn, shaped by exile before he could name it. Sent back to Ireland during the Depression and raised on a farm, he carried displacement into language. I find that his poems endure by stitching loss to place. They bind Ireland to the wider world, proving identity can survive fracture. I love how his work teaches us that poetry, like memory, outlasts borders, hardship, and more.
Here is a brief excerpt that speaks directly to endurance and exile, from The Rough Field:
“I returned to a landscape that remembered me.”
— "The Rough Field" (1972), John Montague
In this poem, I see Montague writing of returning to a childhood landscape of Ulster, scarred by history, where land and memory and violence persist together. The speaker endures by naming what has been broken without abandoning it. I think this shows us how survival often means staying present inside pain, even if inherited, rather than escaping it.
I want to share a few of my favorite quotes that tie poetry to endurance. These words remind us that poems do not simply exist in the moment, but carry memories that outlast us. Enjoy these sparks that connect what endures with the work we do as writers and readers.
“A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.” — Robert Frost Frost’s image shows how poems endure because they rise from persistent human need.
“A poem is a gesture toward home.” — Gwendolyn Brooks Here, endurance is the sustained movement back toward a place of belonging.
“If we winter this one out, we can summer anywhere.” — Seamus Heaney A line that frames endurance as survival through hardship, with the promise of return.
Khe Hy’s story is endurance hidden behind success. Though he reached wealth, status, and comfort, he felt empty. What sustained him was creative work pursued quietly after hours. Leaving security required resilience through doubt, risk, and misunderstanding. By enduring the uncertain middle, he turned what kept him alive on the side into a meaningful, full-time life.
Rediscover connection through poetry that hits bone.
In a world that pulls you in every direction, feeling disconnected is real. Through original poetry, essays, and craft insights, each themed issue helps readers reconnect...with themselves, their stories, and the world around them.
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