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Column 410

Up Against It

Intro by Ted Kooser
01.27.2013

If you’ve fol­lowed this col­umn through a good part of the sev­en years we’ve been pub­lish­ing it, you know how hooked I am on poems that take a close look at the ordi­nary world. Here’s a fine poem by Eamon Gren­nan, who lives in New York state, about bees caught up against a closed window.

Up Against It

It’s the way they cannot understand the window
they buzz and buzz against, the bees that take
a wrong turn at my door and end up thus
in a drift at first of almost idle curiosity,
cruising the room until they find themselves
smack up against it and they cannot fathom how
the air has hardened and the world they know
with their eyes keeps out of reach as, stuck there
with all they want just in front of them, they must
fling their bodies against the one unalterable law
of things—this fact of glass—and can only go on
making the sound that tethers their electric
fury to what’s impossible, feeling the sting in it.
 

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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 ©2010 by Eamon Grennan from his most recent book of poems, Out of Sight: New & Selected Poems, Graywolf Press, 2010. Poem reprinted by permission of Eamon Grennan and the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2024 by The Poetry Foundation.