A POEM FOR YOUR THOUGHTS

American Life in Poetry: Column 510

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE

 

Billy Collins, who lives in New York, is one of our country’s most admired poets, and this snapshot of a winter day is reminiscent of those great Chinese poems that on the virtue of their clarity and precision have survived for a couple of thousand years. His most recent book of poetry is Aimless Love: New and Selected Poems, (Random House, 2013). Winter  A little heat in the iron radiator, the dog breathing at the foot of the bed, and the windows shut tight, encrusted with hexagons of frost. I can barely hear the geese complaining in the vast sky, flying over the living and the dead, schools and prisons, and the whitened fields.