Looking Beneath the Surface
The Poetry Posse Closes June's Allegory Month
Looking Beneath the Surface
When June began, we invited the our poets to spend a month writing allegory.
At first glance, that sounded like a literary exercise.
It became something much stranger.
And much more beautiful.
Over the course of the month, twenty-one allegories appeared. They came wearing the disguises allegory has always loved: rabbits and wolves, gardens and orchards, stars and tides, markets and mountains, foxes and bears. Each poet chose different symbols. Each walked a different road.
Yet by month’s end, standing back from the entire collection, another pattern emerged.
These poems were never asking us merely to interpret symbols.
They were asking us to practice being human.
That may be the oldest purpose of allegory.
Long before psychology gave language to the inner life, long before philosophy built systems around ethics, storytellers understood that a truth carried inside an image often reaches deeper than a truth carried inside an argument. Allegory allows us to rehearse wisdom before life requires it of us. It gives us a place to encounter ourselves safely, quietly, honestly.
Reading these poems together, I found myself wondering whether allegory has ever really been about disguise.
Perhaps it has always been about recognition.
PancakeSushi’s United We Stand begins with a body arguing with itself. Fingers, feet, nose, back, even the buttocks compete for importance, each convinced it carries the greater burden. It is wonderfully funny until it suddenly isn’t. Beneath the laughter sits humility. The poem reminds us that every system collapses when one part forgets it belongs to the whole.
Eleora McConnell offered two very different landscapes, yet both explored the same enduring question.
In The Vestal and the Unseen Flame, duty and desire exist together without canceling one another. The poem resists easy judgment, trusting readers to inhabit the tension instead of resolving it. Human beings, it suggests, are always larger than the roles they faithfully perform.
In Unfiltered Horizon, she turns toward our modern world, where curated realities threaten to replace lived experience. What begins as a contemporary retelling of Plato’s cave becomes something even more intimate: a mother’s hope that her son will trust his own encounter with truth more than the comfort of inherited certainty.
Dorie Snow/雪多丽 writes with remarkable tenderness, yet her gentleness should never be mistaken for softness.
The White Rabbit Fable teaches us that compassion reaches its fullest expression only when it includes the self among those worthy of mercy.
The Koi and the Rain offers another lesson entirely. Love arrives. Love leaves. Love transforms. The deepest relationships alter the shape of our lives so completely that even after they depart, we continue swimming differently. Dorie reminds us that remembrance is an active way of living.
Kristina Ray’s Melted may be one of the month’s shortest allegories, yet it opens an enormous emotional door. By allowing the Wicked Witch to become an abandoned version of the self, she acknowledges something many of us quietly experience: healing often includes grieving identities we are grateful to have outgrown.
Nina Simperi’s poems consistently discover revelation inside ordinary life.
A garden teaches trust in unseen growth.
A marketplace teaches that integrity travels farther than spectacle.
A carefully prepared meal becomes a meditation on discernment, where choosing what to leave out proves as important as choosing what to include.
A runner quietly reminds us that endurance has its own wisdom.
None of these poems demand extraordinary settings because Nina continually demonstrates that ordinary life already contains extraordinary teachers.
Sara da Encarnação’s The Tide offers one of the collection’s quietest revelations. The tide never clings to what it gathers. It participates in a rhythm larger than possession. Reading it, one begins to wonder how much suffering begins the moment we ask permanence to perform a task it was never given.
Carlos M. returns repeatedly to inheritance, yet each poem examines a different inheritance.
In Once More, Never Before, identity becomes both legacy and originality.
In First Victory, the greatest triumph is preserving one’s humanity when power makes cruelty possible.
In The Wisdom of Time, wisdom itself passes between generations through presence rather than instruction.
Together, these poems remind us that character is rarely taught directly. It is witnessed, practiced, and slowly embodied.
Mark Crutchfield’s orchard blooms faithfully through the generations until someone notices the oldest tree has quietly stopped flowering. His poem speaks to every tradition, every family story, every shared ritual. Meaning survives through attention. The moment we stop seeing, memory begins to fade long before the blossom falls.
Victoria Grace gives weight to healing.
Her pebbles become the familiar burdens we carry because they have shaped our hands for so long. Her wildflowers remind us that freedom is rarely experienced as emptiness. Empty hands discover new ways to hold joy.
Kim Williams, M.Div. lifts us into the heavens with Sunlight, where one small star refuses the destiny assigned to it. What first appears as rebellion reveals itself as vocation. The unknown darkness receives its own sun because one voice remained faithful to its deepest calling.
Bear Sage’s allegories consistently search beneath visible events for the unseen currents shaping them.
The Voice asks what becomes of a society that slowly relinquishes its own attention.
The Father Wound follows inherited patterns through generations until love and injury become almost indistinguishable.
The Little Red Fox honors the quiet architecture of sacrificial care that sustains families long before anyone learns to thank it.
The Bear and the Sage dissolves the imagined distance between instinct and wisdom, revealing both drinking from the same ancient creek.
Read together, these four works continually invite us beneath the visible world into the hidden systems that quietly shape our lives.
As I sat with these poems, I realized they were all asking me to cultivate something.
Humility.
Discernment.
Mercy.
Patience.
Attention.
Remembrance.
Integrity.
Presence.
Courage.
Wonder.
Stewardship.
Compassion.
Release.
Each allegory became less like a puzzle to solve and more like a practice to inhabit.
Perhaps that is why this month felt different.
These poems never asked us to admire clever symbolism.
They invited us to become participants.
They slowed our reading until we could feel the rhythm of a tide, the weight of a pebble, the ache in a wolf’s scar, the warmth beneath a fox’s den, the silence beneath a blossom, the current beneath a bear’s reflection.
They reminded us that wisdom rarely announces itself.
It waits.
Inside familiar things.
Inside recurring seasons.
Inside ordinary gestures.
Inside stories.
And perhaps that is the quiet miracle of allegory.
It teaches us that the world has always been speaking.
The creek.
The orchard.
The stars.
The market.
The garden.
The rabbit.
The bear.
They were never merely symbols.
They were invitations.
Thank you to every poet who trusted us with one.
Thank you to every reader who accepted the invitation to join us this month.
About The Poetry Posse
A collective of poets writing in conversation. We respond to shared themes, creative constraints, and each other’s work—proving poetry is better when it’s collaborative, not solitary. Each series pushes us into new territory. Join the conversation.
As a member of The Poetry Posse, I just wanted to express what an absolute honour it has been to be part of this incredible posse this month.
Thank you for this magnificent reflection on the month of allegory. Your words beautifully express the profound shift from interpreting symbols to "practicing being human." I found myself nodding in agreement at the idea that allegory is less about "disguise" and more about "recognition," and how these poems gently asked us to cultivate such essential virtues as humility, patience, and compassion.
The understanding that "the world has always been speaking" through the creek, the orchard, the rabbit and that these are "invitations" rather than mere symbols, is a truly poignant and lasting takeaway. What an extraordinary project this has been, and what a gift to have shared in its deeper meaning with all of you.
In love and Light
Thank you, Carlos and all of the Poetry Posse for such a wonderful celebration of Allegory month and all the great poems and thoughts shared.