Newsletter sign up

Be the first to know when new American Life in Poetry columns are live.

Column 159

The Inevitable

Intro by Ted Kooser
04.16.2008

Bad news all too often arrives with a ring­ing tele­phone, all too ear­ly in the morn­ing. But some­times it comes with less empha­sis, by reg­u­lar mail. Here Allan Peter­son of Flori­da gets at the feel­ings of receiv­ing bad news by let­ter, not by direct­ly stat­ing how he feels but by sud­den­ly notic­ing the world that sur­rounds the moment when that news arrives. 

The Inevitable

To have that letter arrive
was like the mist that took a meadow
and revealed hundreds
of small webs once invisible
The inevitable often
stands by plainly but unnoticed
till it hands you a letter
that says death and you notice
the weed field had been
readying its many damp handkerchiefs
all along

Share this column

Disclaimer

We do not accept unsolicited submissions

We do not accept unsolicited submissions. 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 © 2007 by Allan Peterson, whose most recent book of poetry is "All the Lavish in Common," U. of Mass. Pr., 2005, winner of the Juniper Prize. Reprinted from “The Chattahoochee Review,” Winter 2007, V. 27, no. 2, by permission of the author. Introduction copyright © 2024 by The Poetry Foundation.