Poem of the Week, by Tom Hennen
After a lifetime of winter (the Adirondack mountains, Vermont, Minnesota) I can do without -40 windchills, insta-frozen nose hairs, ice and the mummification required to step onto the front steps with shovel in hand, but I could never do without the change of seasons. Spring, summer, fall, winter: I don’t know how life is experienced by people who live in places where nothing much changes, weatherwise. I only know what it feels like to wake up and step outside and smell the air and look at the sky and listen to ice melting or birds singing or wind in the leaves, to see that first maple leaf flutter red to the ground in the fall or that first pussy willow budding in the spring, and how it hurts my heart. Not hurts, exactly, but that’s part of it. Stretches my heart. Fills my heart. Reminds me that time is turning, for all of us —In the darkness of the barn their woolly backs were full of light gathered on summer pastures–and how nothing ever really goes away. Every summer is held deep in the heart of every winter.
Sheep in the Winter Night, by Tom Hennen
Inside the barn the sheep were standing, pushed close to one
another. Some were dozing, some had eyes wide open listening
in the dark. Some had no doubt heard of wolves. They looked
weary with all the burdens they had to carry, like being thought
of as stupid and cowardly, disliked by cowboys for the way they
eat grass about an inch into the dirt, the silly look they have
just after shearing, of being one of the symbols of the Christian
religion. In the darkness of the barn their woolly backs were
full of light gathered on summer pastures. Above them their
white breath was suspended, while far off in the pine woods,
night was deep in silence. The owl and rabbit were wondering,
along with the trees, if the air would soon fill with snowflakes,
but the power that moves through the world and makes our
hair stand on end was keeping the answer to itself.
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ollege, and how when I make coffee for her she sits quietly at the kitchen table, her head slightly bowed, silent, because she’s not a morning person, and how her black hair shines in the lamplight. Then I pictured the other daughter, who lives in Boston and whose room still smells like her, and I resisted the urge to get up and walk across the hall and open the door to her so I could breathe her in. Then I pictured the son who lives in Chicago and I remembered the collection of duct tape + cardboard swords he made when he was a little boy. And the other people I most love –the best friend, the painter, the sisters and brother and parents and friends– gathered together in my mind in the dark. All this is to say that when I read the poem below, it feels exactly like those middle of the night thoughts – that everything that matters is small and specific and enormous at the same time.
Young woman across the street, waving and calling to me as I trudge through the snowdrifts on the way home from 
Poetry sites are bookmarked on my computer and the first thing I do when I wake up is go from one to the other, reading poems. Four per morning, sometimes more. I hardly ever read any poems I like. Why do you read poems you don’t like? asks the man who knows me best, watching me sigh and roll my eyes. Because I have to read a ton of poems I don’t like in order to find one I do like, which is the truth. Maybe one out of a hundred poems will seize me. Even so, one out of a hundred poems adds up. They add up and up and up, to a beautiful tumble of beautiful poems I will keep reading forever. You know what else adds up? Cruel statements add up, and vicious diatribes add up, and chants of lock her up add up, and rallies of falsehoods and hatred add up. But good deeds add up too, damn it, and so do people who fill a hollow no one else can fill, as in this beautiful poem below. Hail to the unsung and underpaid caregivers, for they are the ones who mend the wounds, smooth the sheets, clean the vomit of humanity from the streets and from our souls.
Alison McGhee 