This is the work of Pulitzer Prize winner and former U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser: to chisel away at the stone of everyday life and discover the poetry already hiding inside. Kooser’s new collection, Splitting an Order (Copper Canyon Press, $23), does just that: Kooser’s careful observations of objects, animals, people and places reveal the beauty that exists everywhere around us.
Dulce Et Decorum Est
Wilfred Owen
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped
Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Psalm 8
I stare into the night,
straining to see past the stars,
trying to catch a glimpse of your hands.
My hands reach out,
clean and pale and soft,
the darkness slides between my fingers.
Yours must be worn and tired,
the scarred hands of a sculptor
whose work has faded into obscurity.
The moon floats above,
I huddle in its glow,
a lost child.
I listen to the cold wind,
longing for a voice,
the silence stings my cheeks.
You stand just beyond my grasp –
unfathomable, incomprehensible,
watching from above.