Poetry

aroundtownpoem #10 our campus is a little eden joannie is its goddess it’s here my lines were going to end after a few words about the fragrant linden aisle bluestem grass purple coneflowers prairie dropseed joe pye weed with a few dandelions thrown in as well and how blissful to have a job whose purpose […]

This poem was among several penned by local writer Barb Olson about the tornadoes that tore through the Springfield area on March 12. After the Tornado, March 2006 A storm came from out around Curran and Loami, east past Parkway Point and hit the Wabash Corner hard. Twister or straight winds, whatever it was, tore […]

Writing and reading poetry, we are invited to join with others in celebrating life — even the ordinary, daily pleasures. Here Seattle poet and physician Peter Pereira offers a simple meal. A Pot of Red Lentils simmers on the kitchen stove. All afternoon dense kernels surrender to the fertile juices, their tender bellies swelling with […]

radiopoem #3 when the signal begins to falter letting in a burst of some oily evangelist or some screeching singer do you ever pull your car onto the shoulder in order to hear the end of dvorák’s serenade in e major or the response to a trenchant question from fresh air do you ever reverse […]

radiopoem #2 the sweet-faced curly-haired early morning guard at the Y instead of inane talk radio or even worse music tunes in to morning edition so we can both listen to what’s going on not miss cokey roberts’ analysis garrison keillor’s poem daniel shorr’s wise words our guard’s a musician plays gigs at his church […]

A circus is an assemblage of illusions, and here Jo McDougall, a Kansas poet, shows us a couple of performers, drab and weary in their ordinary lives, away from the lights at the center of the ring. What We Need It is just as well we do not see, in the shadows behind the hasty […]

lovepoem #6 sometimes you do things right I doubt she remembers I didn’t till I found it jotted in an old journal but my youngest thirteen coming down the darkened back stairs was met at the foot by her mother who grabbed her struggling and yelping and smothered her with kisses you have to watch […]

Poet Ruth L. Schwartz writes of the glimpse of possibility, of something sweeter than we already have that comes to us, grows in us. The unrealizable part of it causes bitterness; the other opens outward, the cycle complete. This is both a poem about a tangerine and about more than that. Tangerine It was a […]

countrysidepoem #3 so what’s geocaching you ask well it’s when you hide a treasure cache and people seek it with their GPS and then they sign in when they find it I hid one on an abandoned railway trestle east of rochester called it curiouser and curiouser everything in it alice related cards chess pieces […]

What a marvelous gift is the imagination, and each of us gets one at birth, free of charge and ready to start up, get on, and ride away. Can there be anything quite so homely and ordinary as a steam radiator? And yet, here, Connie Wanek, of Duluth, Minn., nudges one into play. Radiator Mittens […]

grandchildpoem  #4 coming in from a vigorous afternoon playing in a late march snowstorm wyatt three shedding cap coat mittens says to nobody in particular this was a lovely lovely beautiful beautiful wonderful wonderful time and I catched a snowflake on my eye © Jacqueline Jackson 2006

Walt Whitman’s poems took in the world through a wide-angle lens, including nearly everything, but most later poets have focused much more narrowly. Here the poet and novelist Jim Harrison nods to Whitman with a sweeping, inclusive poem about the course of life. Marching At dawn I heard among bird calls the billions of marching […]