Finally Poetry Installment

I promise not to keep posting poems, but as part of my reading this year I purposed to read a volume of poetry and in April I've read three.

Ted Kooser was the Poet Laureate of the United States. Last year he wrote a wonderful picture book, Bag in the Wind, about recycling (gorgeous artwork as well!). After reading that book I decided to spend some time reading his poetry and checked out the three volumes my library owned (sadly I was the first or second person to them out, even though they've been in the system for years).

This last volume I read, Delights & Shadows, had several beautiful poems in it and I thought I'd share three I particularly liked.


A BOX OF PASTELS

I once held on my knees a simple wooden box
in which a rainbow lay dusty and broken.
It was a set of pastels that had years before
belonged to the painter Mary Cassatt,
and all of the colors she'd used in her work
lay open before me. Those hues she'd most used,
the peaches and pinks, were worn down to stubs,
while the cool colors--violet, ultramarine--
had been set, scarcely touched, to one side.
She'd had little patience with darkness, and her heart
held only a measure of shadow. I touched
the warm dust of those colors, her tools,
and left there with light on the tips of my fingers.


THE EARLY BIRD

Still dark, and raining hard
on a cold May morning

and yet the early bird
is out there chirping,

chirping its sweet-sour
wooden-pulley notes,

pleased, it would seem,
to be given work,

hauling the heavy
bucket of dawn

up from the darkness,
note over note,

and letting us drink.


TECTONICS

In only a few months
there begin to be fissures
in what we remember,
and within a year or two,
the facts break apart
one from another
and slowly begin to shift
and turn, grinding,
pushing up over each other
until their shapes
have been changed
and the past has become
a new world.
And after many years,
even a love affair,
one lush green island
all to itself,
perfectly detailed
with even a candle
softly lighting a smile,
may slide under the waves
like Atlantis,
scarcely rippling the heart.