Poem of the Week: “Yoshi’s House” by Stephen Sexton

“Yoshi’s House” is the first poem in Stephen Sexton’s debut collection If All the World and Love Were Young. While the title of the collection comes from the Sir Walter Raleigh poem “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd,” each poem in the book is titled after a different level of Super Mario World (1990).

Yoshi’s House

These are the days of no letters the magenta mailbox jitters
out of the visible spectrum babies chirp in our holly tree
mountains yield to the foreground and sadly again they’re beautiful:
my friends scattered in the lowlands the fire seizes in the grate
the smoke signals across the eaves say all I really mean to say
I have gone to rescue my friends I’ll think of you and you and you.

– Stephen Sexton, from If All the World and Love Were Young (2024)