Ted Kooser, US Poet Laureate from 2004 to 2006. Photo by UNL Publications and Photography.

Peter Everwine is a California poet whose work I have admired for almost as long as I have been writing. Here he beautifully captures a quiet moment of reflection.

Rain

Toward evening, as the light failed

and the pear tree at my window darkened,

I put down my book and stood at the open door,

the first raindrops gusting in the eaves,

a smell of wet clay in the wind.

Sixty years ago, lying beside my father,

half asleep, on a bed of pine boughs as rain

drummed against our tent, I heard

for the first time a loon’s sudden wail

drifting across that remote lake—

a loneliness like no other,

though what I heard as inconsolable

may have been only the sound of something

untamed and nameless

singing itself to the wilderness around it

and to us until we slept. And thinking of my father

and of good companions gone

into oblivion, I heard the steady sound of rain

and the soft lapping of water, and did not know

whether it was grief or joy or something other

that surged against my heart

and held me listening there so long and late.

Ted Kooser was US Poet Laureate from 2004 to 2006. He is a professor in the English Department of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He lives on an acreage near the village of Garland, Nebraska, with his wife Kathleen Rutledge, the editor of the Lincoln Journal Star.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org),

publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of

Nebraska, Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2009 by Donal Heffernan, whose most recent book of poetry is

“Duets of Motion,” Lone Oak Press, 2001. Poem reprinted by permission of Donal Heffernan.

Introduction copyright ©2010 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

American Life in Poetry ©2006 The Poetry Foundation

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This column does not accept unsolicited poetry.