Rae: Poems

Here are a few of my favorite poems:

The Peace of Wild Things
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

by Wendell Berry

The Middle Daughter
If you threw her in the water
she would float upstream.
What if baby Moses had floated upstream,
bobbing toward Lake Victoria in his bullrush boat,
passing the transfixed laundry women,
leaving them behind in a wake of amazement?
What would have become of the children of Israel?
This middle daughter forgets,
there is always history.

Show her white, she sees black.
The problem is her vision.
From infancy she has thrown off
every color we wrapped her in:
first the pink, contemptuous,
and later even the blue, for reasons
we hadn't the nerve to be thankful for.
She wants to wear red, or nothing.
And you should see her with her red shirt
flapping on her spindle body
like some solo flag,
marching up the river,
leading the salmon to slaughter.
She says they aren't really dying.
She says something is born of swimming upstream
that finds its way back to the sea
and spreads like a grassfire through the seaweed
across the floor of underwater continents
and finally comes back to the very same river,
not one, but a thousand fish,
a generation of fish.
This middle daughter believes
she will make history.

by Barbara Kingsolver (when she signed her book for me she inscribed it to me as a middle daughter...I am one and can really identify with this poem.)

Christmas in Utah
In barns turned from the wind
the quarter-horses
twitch their laundered blankets.
Three Steller's Jays,
crests sharp as ice,
bejewel the pine tree.
Rough cold out of Idaho
bundles irrational tumbleweed
the length of Main Street.

Higher than snowpeaks,
shriller than the frost,
a brazen angel blows his silent trumpet.

by Leslie Norris