Surviving
There are days when the fear of death
is as ubiquitous as light. It illuminates
everything. Without it, I might not
have noticed this ladybird beetle,
bright as a drop of blood
on the window’s white sill.
Her head no bigger than a period,
her eyes like needle points,
she has stopped for a moment to rest,
knees locked, wing covers hiding
the delicate lace of her wings.
As the fear of death, so attentive
to everything living, comes near her,
the tiny antennae stop moving.
“Surviving,” from Ted Kooser’s Delights and Shadows, appears courtesy of Copper Canyon Press, www.coppercanyonpress.org.
The Blind Always Come as Such a Surprise
The blind always come as such a surprise,
suddenly filling an elevator
with a great white porcupine of canes,
or coming down upon us in a noisy crowd
like the eye of a hurricane.
The dashboards or cars stopped at crosswalks
and the shoes of commuters on trains
are covered with sentences
struck down in mid-flight by the canes of the blind.
Each of them changes our lives,
tapping across the bright circles of our ambitions
like cracks traversing the favorite china.
“The Blind Always Come as Such a Surprise” is from FLYING AT NIGHT: POEMS 1965-1985, by Ted Kooser, © 1980, 1985. Reprinted by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.
Please see Ted Kooser’s interview at “Ted Kooser, Interviews with Writers”