Rural Oklahoma Museum of Poetry
Poetry of the People
Dandelion in winter
Has lost its head
It did not roll down a hill
Nor drown in an ocean
Though the ocean may have
Longed for it
Sumac seeds and wildflower,
Pine cone and pine needle,
All watched
And said nothing.
–Shaun Perkins
My junior class collected things on the ground outside the other day and made poems out of them.
I had an old man, a child, a cat, and a dog.
Lost them in the middle of a country song,
when a hill came rolling down,
soft, but tearing up the ground.
Now my head is rolling ’round,
zigzagging away at any sound. Continue reading “Ballad of the Rolling Hill”
A teacher friend of mine loves Walt Whitman’s work just like I do. She and her students regularly sound their “barbaric yawp” around the classroom and hallways. Unfortunately, as is the case in many schools, the administration does not appreciate nor understand poetic expression. She recently received this email from her principal: Continue reading “Barbaric Yawp”
Here is what I bring to you, Day:
A restlessness haunting the hours,
Like the moon behind the trees—here,
And here, now here. A belief
In the core, the place of origin,
Creek water walked in as a child,
The dirt tracks toy Corvettes made,
My son’s laughter exploding
From a pile of leaves we never
Gathered in fall. I give this all up Continue reading “To Day”
She scattered the seeds wide, far from her, to the edge of the furrowed land,
beyond garden, beyond home and the human notion of property,
Into the land of other and the stories she did not shape
Yet had a hand in the telling because
We all have a hand in the telling
Of our lives,
The lie to pass on, Continue reading “Security of the Safe”
We stopped the white Chevy with the rusted tailgate,
Half in the ditch, and walked up the hillside,
Through the pine trees and scrub oak, fall leaves
Like letters in an abandoned apartment cracking
Under our feet. There was nothing and everything
To see in the woods, the snake skin, coyote scat,
Half-hidden killdeer nest, muddy water of the hollow.
He pointed these things out to me, a child learning
to see from her father. We all learn
To see from the people who came before us. Continue reading “The Killdeer”
Rural Oklahoma Museum of Poetry 