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Column 510

Winter

Intro by Ted Kooser
12.28.2014

Bil­ly Collins, who lives in New York, is one of our country’s most admired poets, and this snap­shot of a win­ter day is rem­i­nis­cent of those great Chi­nese poems that on the virtue of their clar­i­ty and pre­ci­sion have sur­vived for a cou­ple of thou­sand years. His most recent book of poet­ry is Aim­less Love: New and Select­ed Poems, (Ran­dom House, 2013).

Winter

A little heat in the iron radiator,
the dog breathing at the foot of the bed,

and the windows shut tight,
encrusted with hexagons of frost.

I can barely hear the geese
complaining in the vast sky,

flying over the living and the dead,
schools and prisons, and the whitened fields.

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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 ©2014 by Billy Collins, “Winter” (Poetry East, No. 82, 2014).  Poem reprinted by permission of Billy Collins and the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2024 by The Poetry Foundation.