dumbfoundry

American Life in Poetry: Column 004 [US]:

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE

None of us can fix the past. Mistakes we've made can burden us for many years, delivering their pain to the present as if they had happened just yesterday. In the following poem we join with Ruth Stone in revisiting a hurried decision, and we empathize with the intense regret of being unable to take that decision back, or any other decision, for that matter.

Another Feeling

Once you saw a drove of young pigs
crossing the highway. One of them
pulling his body by the front feet,
the hind legs dragging flat.
Without thinking,
you called the Humane Society.
They came with a net and went for him.
They were matter of fact, uniformed;
there were two of them,
their truck ominous, with a cage.
He was hiding in the weeds. It was then
you saw his eyes. He understood.
He was trembling.
After they took him, you began to suffer regret.
Years later, you remember his misfit body
scrambling to reach the others.
Even at this moment, your heart
is going too fast; your hands sweat.

Reprinted from "In the Dark," Copper Canyon Press, 2004, by permission of the author and publisher. 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.

Poetry in the papers = good.

By the way, I asked about the circulation of this column and got this:

Approximately 50 newspapers, dailies and weeklies, have signed up so far, with combined circulation exceeding 4.7 million readers. These include, but are obviously not limited to, the Detroit Metro Times, Roanoke (VA) Times, Rapid City (SD) Journal, and The Lincoln Journal-Star.

This is only our third week, and I suspect that these numbers will change quite a lot in the coming weeks and months.

This entry was posted by eeksypeeksy on Friday, April 22, 2005 at 9:02 AM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.