By Norah Christianson Otherwise By Jane Kenyon I got out of bed on two strong legs. It might have been otherwise. I ate cereal, sweet milk, ripe, flawless peach. It might have been otherwise. I took the dog uphill to the birch wood. All morning I did the work I love. At noon I lay […]
By Norah Christianson A Blessing By James Wright Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota, Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass. And the eyes of those two Indian ponies Darken with kindness. They have come gladly out of the willows To welcome my friend and me. We step over the barbed wire into the […]
By Norah Christianson Starlight By Philip Levine My father stands in the warm evening on the porch of my first house. I am four years old and growing tired. I see his head among the stars, the glow of his cigarette, redder than the summer moon riding low over the old neighborhood. We are alone, […]
By Norah Christianson Lobocraspis griseifusa By Ted Kooser This is the tiny moth who lives on tears, who drinks like a deer at the gleaming pool at the edge of the sleeper’s eye, the touch of its mouth as light as a cloud’s reflection. In your dream, a moonlit figure appears at your bedside and […]
By Norah Christianson A Story About the Body By Robert Hass The young composer, working that summer at an artist’s colony, had watched her for a week. She was Japanese, a painter, almost sixty, and he thought he was in love with her. He loved her work, and her work was like the way she […]
By Norah Christianson Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming” came into my mind the day after October 7th when Hamas attacked Israel. The poem is so eerily prescient, so nightmarish, I thought I oughtn’t to make the Stratford Crier readers even more distraught than we are. But we read the papers, yes? We watch the ghastly […]
By Norah Christianson It’s time for some love. The world is a mess, horror is afoot, governments are nuts, we’re murdering our earth, and there’s enough hate in the world to wither the soul to ash. There is that. But there is also love. I saw it the other day in ShopRite when two old […]
By Norah Christianson I have been grieving for Israel and for Palestine, as we all have. I’ve been reflecting on all the war poems in the world, going back to the “lliad” and beyond. Here are bits taken from poems written by poets known in English literature as the War Poets. – N. C. You […]
By Norah Christianson Introduction to Poetry By Billy Collins I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide or press an ear against its hive. I say drop a mouse into a poem and watch him probe his way out, or walk inside the poem’s room […]
“Traveling thru the Dark” By Norah Christian Traveling Through the Dark By William Stafford Traveling through the dark I found a deer dead on the edge of the Wilson River road. It is usually best to roll them into the canyon: that road is narrow; to swerve might make more dead. By glow of the […]
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