Untitled Document
overheardpoem #1
there
are some compliments
you hoard in your memory bank
as capital against
stinging remarks
heard or overheard or written anon
ymously by a
student on your
class evaluation form one I cherish
is when my new
obstetrician
we moved a lot said
to his nurse she’s not your
ordinary pap smear
© Jacqueline Jackson 2007
Our species has developed monstrous weapons that can
kill not only all of us but everything else on the planet, yet when the
wind rises we run for cover, as we have done for as long as we’ve
been on this earth. Here’s hoping we never have the skill or
arrogance to conquer the weather. And weather stories? We tell them in the
same way our ancestors related encounters with fearsome dragons. This poem
by Minnesota poet Warren Woessner honors the tradition by sharing an
experience with a hurricane.
Alberto
When the wind clipped the whitecaps, and the flags came down before they shredded, we knew it was no nor’easter. The Blue Nose ferry stayed on course, west out of Yarmouth, while 100 miles of fog on the Bay blew away.
The Captain let us stand on the starboard bridge and scan a jagged range. Shearwaters skimmed the peaks while storm petrels hunted valleys that slowly filled with gold. Alberto blew out in the Atlantic. We came back to earth that for days might tip and sway and cast us back to sea.
Poem copyright © 1998 by Warren Woessner,
whose book of poetry, Clear All the Rest of the
Way, is forthcoming from The Backwaters Press.
Reprinted from Iris Rising (BkMk Press of UMKC, 1998) with permission of the author.
Introduction copyright © 2006 by The Poetry Foundation.
Ted Kooser served as the U.S. Poet Laureate from
2004-2006. For more information, go to www.americanlifeinpoetry.org.
This article appears in Jul 5-11, 2007.
