American Life in PoetryA feature provided by Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate, 2004-2006 |
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Peter Everwine is a California poet whose work I have admired for almost as long as I have been writing. Here he beautifully captures a quiet moment of reflection.
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Rain Toward evening, as the light failed and the pear tree at my window darkened, I put down my book and stood at the open door, the first raindrops gusting in the eaves, a smell of wet clay in the wind. Sixty years ago, lying beside my father, half asleep, on a bed of pine boughs as rain drummed against our tent, I heard for the first time a loon’s sudden wail drifting across that remote lake— a loneliness like no other, though what I heard as inconsolable may have been only the sound of something untamed and nameless singing itself to the wilderness around it and to us until we slept. And thinking of my father and of good companions gone into oblivion, I heard the steady sound of rain and the soft lapping of water, and did not know whether it was grief or joy or something other that surged against my heart and held me listening there so long and late. |
American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Introduction copyright © 2009 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006.
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