October 2015
When I think of debts (other than those to family), I think first of libraries and librarians – God bless them every one. A college professor for more than 30 years, I taught first at Oregon State and since 1992 at Linfield College. Five books of poems carry my name on their spines, including an Oregon Book Award winner (1989) and the most recent two from Jessie Lendennie’s Salmon Poetry, which, delightfully, has a mailing address without a single number in it.
To Us
One hour that morning
as night turned black to gray,
seven children dead in a fire
became perceptible to sight
as wind in trees is to ears,
and an old man’s exultation
rode on a flicker’s white,
and a woman dead of cancer
sang in the wings of a crow.
From half blossoms
of mountain ash and cherry,
from chrome glints, bricks
and house numbers,
dead voices rose, familiar,
so many of them happy.
Even the stunned and unwilling
rustled and sighed, eased
by the weight of emotion
and meaning shrugged off,
left behind in common to us.
-reprinted from One Hour That Morning & Other Poems, Salmon Poetry (Ireland), 2014.
One hour that morning
as night turned black to gray,
seven children dead in a fire
became perceptible to sight
as wind in trees is to ears,
and an old man’s exultation
rode on a flicker’s white,
and a woman dead of cancer
sang in the wings of a crow.
From half blossoms
of mountain ash and cherry,
from chrome glints, bricks
and house numbers,
dead voices rose, familiar,
so many of them happy.
Even the stunned and unwilling
rustled and sighed, eased
by the weight of emotion
and meaning shrugged off,
left behind in common to us.
-reprinted from One Hour That Morning & Other Poems, Salmon Poetry (Ireland), 2014.
©2015 Lex Runciman