Welcome to The Hurt & the Miracle

with Chera Hammons

I’m so glad you’re here.

I’m a poet and novelist whose work is grounded in love for the natural world.

When I was a little girl, I’d spend my summers visiting cousins in the Piney Woods of East Texas. My adoptive grandparents lived in a ramshackle rural home surrounded by trees.

I relished waking up early in that house and sitting alone on the porch in my pajamas to watch the sun come up. There was nothing else like it: the sky blushing over the brightening green, the birdsong gathering strength until it became an exciting rush of sound. I felt safe and unworried. I felt like myself. This rich sort of solitude was something I couldn’t experience at home in the Texas Panhandle. Where there are no trees, there’s no shelter. Everything is open, exposed, bare. As fiercely as I have always loved my prairie home, those visits to the forest felt like relief.

This newsletter takes its name from a poem I wrote October 31st, 2024 (included below). On November 10th, it was published in the Praisesong for the People project created by Texas Poet Laureate Amanda Johnston.

In between the writing of this poem and its publication, I accepted an offer from The Dial Press (an imprint of Random House) to publish my new poetry collection Birds of America, which asks how we love each other, and love the world, when what we love is vanishing. Birds of America will have a wider readership than anything I’ve published previously. It will have the chance to make a real impact in the world. I can’t tell you how much this means to me.

In the same time span, there was also, of course, a dramatic and stressful presidential election, the full implications of which are still uncertain.

As humans, we somehow have to hold so many things all at once. We have to survive in an often dangerous place that is full of contradictions. How can we make sense of it all?

I’ve always admired my mother, who spent much of her childhood in foster care, because she came through unimaginably difficult circumstances with her empathy intact. May we strive to do the same.

When my mother says we will be remembered by what we tried to save

She means young starlings wrapped in kitchen towels,
orphaned cottontails found in the schoolyard,
splay-foot chicks with legs bound.
Still-blind kittens, once hungry and crying,
pulled from behind a woodpile.
The injured goat kid no one else wanted.
The daughter who wanted to name them all.
My mother’s gift to me when I left home:
the necklace I wear for luck now
because my grandmother,
who died when my mother was four,
wore it and had none. My mother, even now,
waits for me in a white room
while I am stitched back into myself,
and hugs too hard, as certain as she has always been
in her belief that the needle hurts less than the splinter.
That a cup of table salt poured into an old sock
and microwaved can draw out an ear infection.
That you might as well try.
I didn’t realize for a long time that we were reading
not just books, but birds. That I was learning
to keep looking for what was gone
as if it would be the last place I looked.
I wish I could speak to my mother before I knew her,
when she was an orphaned girl
who sat listening to the windy prairie pre-dawn,
the field of stars beginning to fade away,
her cheek against the rising
and falling ribs of the brown-eyed cow
that breathed mist into the gentle darkness.
The warm milk that pinged into the pail
as unremarkable as a prayer.
I’d tell her, You were always wanted.
I want to believe that I am beginning to understand now
the work it takes to live.
All the hurt and the miracle of it.

Our homes are made up of so many miracles. The forests, the prairies, the mountains, the deserts, the beaches: all of them teem with life. All of them are beautiful and vital in their own right. But there’s no denying that there is hurt there, too. The natural environment has long been threatened by greed and corruption and carelessness.

I am launching this newsletter to share this world with you in the best way I know how. I want to give you that moment on the porch, the sun coming up over the trees, when you are suddenly glad to be in your body, imperfect though it may be. That moment of relief.

Sometimes these newsletters will share loveliness: a photograph of birds on the wing, a poem about a wild horse running for the joy of it. Sometimes, these newsletters will share heartbreak. Often, there will be both. But to share these things means we are not in this alone. We are here together.

Let’s hold all of this, all the hurt and the miracle of this world, together.

What happens when I subscribe?

You’ll receive free weekly newsletters containing one or more of the following elements:

• A poem, as well as a short description of the context or inspiration behind it

• Announcements of personal writing news, readings, and events

• Occasional discussions of relevant books I’m reading and interviews with other writers

• Occasional anecdotes, observations, or photographs from the natural world that exists right outside my window

• Access to all newsletter archives

• The reminder to slow down and experience a moment of respite and connection

About me

I live in the Texas Panhandle with my partner and our horses, donkeys, chickens, cats, dogs, parakeets, and peacocks. I’ve written poetry since I was around four years old. I began college as a photography major, but ultimately graduated with a degree in General Studies, which means I know a little, but not enough, about everything from business ethics to the principles of geothermal energy to the history of dance. Eventually I received an MFA in Creative Writing. I’ve worked in accounting, information technology, online marketing, and teaching. When I was in elementary school, I volunteered to stay inside during recess and shelve books for the librarian. Aside from watching thunderheads tower in a bright blue sky over a golden prairie, that’s the closest I’ve come to heaven. Well, and there was also that one time I got to hold a falcon.

I’m looking forward to sharing this space with you!

Warmly,

Do you need to take a break from these emails? You can unsubscribe in one click.