Photo by Viktor Vasicsek on Unsplash Naomi Shihab Nye was born in Missouri and spent her high school years in Palestine and Texas. Her experiences as an Arab-American woman infuse her poetry. William Stafford has said that “her poems combine transcendent liveliness and sparkle along with warmth and human insight. She is a champion of the literature of encouragement and heart.” Nye has written numerous books of poems including several for children. It is not so much that the boat passed and you failed to notice it. It is more like the boat stopping directly outside your bedroom window, the captain blowing the signal-horn, the band playing a rousing march. The boat shouted,…

Photo by Nick Chung on Unsplash Ted Kooser is “widely praised for his plainspoken style, his gift for metaphor, and his quiet discoveries of beauty in ordinary things.” He served as a Poet Laureate and is spoken of as the voice of small-town America. His style is simple and natural. Today, from a distance, I saw you walking away, and without a sound the glittering face of a glacier slid into the sea. An ancient oak fell in the Cumberlands, holding only  a handful of leaves, and an old woman scattering corn to her chickens looked up  for an instant. At the other side of the galaxy, a star thirty-five times the size…

Photo by Joanna Kosinska on Unsplash Elizabeth Bishop was born in 1911 in Worcester, Massachusetts (about 30 miles from me) and grew up there and in Novia Scotia. She was a respected poet in her lifetime but has come to more and more prominence in the years since her death. She only published 101 poems because she was a perfectionist and spent a long time refining each poem. Her poems are “marked by precise descriptions of the physical world and an air of poetic serenity, but her underlying themes include the struggle to find a sense of belonging, and the human experiences of grief and longing.” Those themes come through clearly in the…