Wednesday was great. In the morning, I helped Castle Pines
resident
Kathy Hurley post her
April Fool's
Day poem.
I hope you check it out, rate it, maybe make a comment and
write your own poem about April. The best poems under 20 lines will
be considered for our print sections in April.
Wednesday night, I got to see a poet comrade-in-arms,
Chris Ransick, officially recognized as Denver's
first living Poet Laureate (the very first Poet Laureate was
honored posthumously).
Please see my pictures from that night.
Per Friday tradition, here's the
poem of the week from
American Life in Poetry. I hope it and Kathy Hurley inspire you to post a poem to the
site, so that visitors to the site can enjoy it and we can consider
it for print in celebration of National Poetry Month.
Thanks for the read. On to the poem.
By
Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate
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, Minnesota, nudges one
into play.
Radiator
Mittens are drying on the radiator,
boots nearby, one on its side.
Like some monstrous segmented insect
the radiator elongates under the window.
Or it is a beast with many shoulders
domesticated in the Ice Age.
How many years it takes
to move from room to room!
Some cage their radiators
but this is unnecessary
as they have little desire to escape.
Like turtles they are quite self-contained.
If they seem sad, it is only the same sadness
we all feel, unlovely, growing slowly cold.
Reprinted from "Bonfire," New Rivers Press, 1997, by permission
of the author. Copyright (c) 1997 by Connie Wanek. Her most recent
book is "Hartley Field," from Holy Cow! Press. This weekly column
is supported by The Poetry Foundation, The Library of Congress, and
the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
This column does not accept unsolicited poetry.
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American Life in Poetry provides newspapers and online
publications with a free weekly column featuring contemporary
American poems. The sole mission of this project is to promote
poetry: American Life in Poetry seeks to create a vigorous presence
for poetry in our culture.