Barbara Crooker's poems
Barbara Crooker
Barbara Crooker’s poems appear in magazines and anthologies, including The Bedford Introduction toLiterature (Bedford/St. Martin’s), Poetry: an Introduction (Bedford/St. Martin’s), and GoodPoems for Hard Times (Garrison Keillor, editor)(Viking Penguin) Her full-length books are Radiance, which won the 2005 Word Press First Book Award and was a finalist for the 2006 Paterson Poetry Prize; Line Dance (Word Press, 2008), which won the 2009 Paterson Award for Literary Excellence; and More (C&R Press, 1010). She has received three Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowships in Literature and won the 2003 Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award (Stanley Kunitz, judge
LOST IN TRANSLATION
I'm sitting on a brick terrace under a lattice,
the sun branding my skin in random
squares, numbed by the insistence
of a sprinkler hissing on the lawn,
and then a mourning dove starts
calling who who who are you, and I
have run out of words, stunned by the heat.
That bird keeps it up, saying you you you
are here, in the cusp of summer, your hair
turning cartwheels in the limp air, your thighs
stuck to the chair with a film of sweat,
which rivulets down your back; you are baking
in the oven of the sun, waiting to be done,
waiting for a signal, an omen, trying
to decipher these patterns of shadow and light
that could be read like the I Ching,
if only you knew how to read the signs.
WORD CHAIN
aka change-a-letter,
a children's game
"Five quick minutes on war
and peace," she said, as a warm-
up exercise of sorts-- Why not
pick something more note-
worthy, I thought, something we could pin
down, sink our teeth into, not the soft pink
rose on the vine, not the thorns--
MARCH SNOW
The sky is low, an ashy gray,
Equinox soon, a day or so--
The lawn is white with new-sown snow
Spring seems to be quite far away
Looking for worms, three robins peck--
The thumbs of bulbs are poking up
Though smothered in an icy crust
The song we sing: regret, regret
PALMS FULLY OUTSTRETCHED
like the hands and feet
of a baby trying
to understand the world,
I am a pilgrim in my own life.
Lord, it is so green and leafy.
And such a mystery.
How can the orchid
flame to magenta
with the sun behind it,
then fade to dull plum
when it ducks behind
a cloud?
How can this world be so beautiful
and terrible at the same time?
LISTEN
to the small music of the summer rain, its vertical
green stanzas, the swish of tires, as cars push up
the sloping road, leaving silence in their wake.
How inured we are to constant sound, how seldom
do we dwell in silence, brew a cup of tea. Blue lobelia
overflows in hanging baskets over the white porch railing;
rain fills the gutters, filters through maple leaves,
drips in the cedars, makes sequins of droplets
on the lilies of the valley. This deep green space:
tire music, water music, bird song in the interstices.
What seeps in the earth returns to the sky,
a brimful pot of flowers, a blue cascade of stars.
e-mail: info@barbaracrooker.com
Web: barbaracrooker.com
