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Column 232

Baby Wrens’ Voices

Intro by Ted Kooser
08.30.2009

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 five dol­lars 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.

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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 ©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. Introduction copyright © 2024 by The Poetry Foundation.