American Life in Poetry BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006 Bad news all too often arrives with a ringing telephone, all too early in the morning. But sometimes it comes with less emphasis, by regular mail. Here Allan Peterson of Florida gets at the feelings of receiving bad news by letter, not by directly stating how he feels but by suddenly noticing the world that surrounds the moment when that news arrives. The Inevitable To have that letter arrive was like the mist that took a meadow and revealed hundreds of small webs once invisible The inevitable often stands by plainly but unnoticed till it hands you a letter that says death and you notice the weed field had been readying its many damp handkerchiefs all along
Poem copyright (c) 2007 by Allan Peterson. Reprinted from "The Chattahoochee Review," Winter 2007, V. 27, no. 2, by permission of the author. Introduction copyright (c) 2008 by The Poetry Foundation. This column is made possible by the Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org) and supported by the UNL Department of English. This column does not accept unsolicited poetry.
