- Welcome Home Newsletter
- Posts
- A Poet
A Poet
Michael Littig
August 05, 2026
Weekly wisdom to bring you home in 2 minutes, or less.
Happy Wednesday!
Here’s a short story and a poem to inspire you this week.
A SHORT STORY
The Ones Laboratory, August 2026
I’ve been back in the rehearsal room with Theater Mitu for the past two weeks, continuing work on The Ones.
One of the things I treasure most about working with the same company of artists for more than twenty years is how we co-author everything.
In a Mitu room, we’re not confined by our performative identities: actor, director, designer, playwright. Instead, we’re simply artists. Sometimes we create independently. Sometimes collaboratively. But the work belongs to all of us.
While I was in New Zealand, I listened to an interview with Ocean Vuong, who I mention here often. He was asked whether he identifies as a writer.
His answer is something I’ve been reflecting on ever since.
"I don't see being a writer as an ontological truth. It's more like a performance.
I have written, but right now I don't see myself as a writer. I'm not writing anything. I don't have anything going.
There are many things people refer to me as: professor, photographer. But I think poet is the truest sense of myself, from the Greek poietes, meaning maker.
And I think that, at our best, we're all poets. We're making something, even if it's not literature. I think a mother, a father, a brother, at their core is a poet, someone who makes things for other people."
I love that distinction.
Our titles describe what we do. But they don't necessarily describe who we are.
We spend so much of our lives asking what we should become.
Perhaps the better question is:
What are we making for others?
A POEM
“Messenger” by Mary Oliver
My work is loving the world.
Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird—
equal seekers of sweetness.
Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.
Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young, and still half-perfect? Let me
keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work,
which is mostly standing still and learning to be
astonished.
The phoebe, the delphinium.
The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.
Which is mostly rejoicing, since all the ingredients are here,
which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart
and these body-clothes,
a mouth with which to give shouts of joy
to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam,
telling them all, over and over, how it is
that we live forever.
Know of anyone who might benefit from these helpful creative reminders? Send them this link.
Grateful,
Michael
