Kooser on Poetry

Nebraska’s Ted Kooser, U.S. poet laureate from 2004 to 2006, offers “American Life in Poetry,” a column on contemporary poetry.

I’ve built many wren houses since my wife and I moved to the country 25 years ago. It’s a good thing to do in the winter. At one point I had so many extra that in the spring I set up at a local farmers market and sold them for $5 apiece. I say all this to assert that I am an authority at listening to the so-small voices that Thomas R. Smith captures in this poem. Smith lives in Wisconsin.

Baby Wrens’ Voices

I am a student of wrens.

When the mother bird returns

to her brood, beak squirming

with winged breakfast, a shrill

clamor rises like jingling

from tiny, high-pitched bells.

Who’d have guessed such a small

house contained so many voices?

The sound they make is the pure sound

of life’s hunger. Who hangs our house

in the world’s branches, and listens

when we sing from our hunger?

Because I love best those songs

that shake the house of the singer,

I am a student of wrens.

Poem copyright ©2005 by Thomas R. Smith, whose most recent book of poetry is “Waking Before Dawn,” Red Dragonfly Press, 2007. Poem reprinted from the chapbook “Kinnickinnic,” Parallel Press, 2008, by permission of Thomas R. Smith and the publisher. The poem first appeared in “There Is No Other Way to Speak,” the 2005 “winter book” of the Minnesota Center for Book Arts, ed., Bill Holm.

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