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Column 680

Fund Drive

Intro by Ted Kooser
04.01.2018

Art crit­i­cism is noto­ri­ous­ly fick­le. Today’s cel­e­brat­ed artist gets to be nobody soon. After suf­fer­ing years of den­i­gra­tion, Nor­man Rock­well is now val­ued as a far more impor­tant artist than the crit­ics had thought him only a few years ago. This poem by Ter­ri Kir­by Erick­son, a North Car­olin­ian, could have appeared on the cov­er of The Sat­ur­day Evening Post, and I mean that as a high com­pli­ment. It’s from Erick­son’s book, Becom­ing the Blue Heron, from Press 53.

Fund Drive

She could be a Norman Rockwell painting,
the small girl on my front porch with her eager
face, her wind-burned cheeks red as cherries.
Her father waits by the curb, ready to rescue
his child should danger threaten, his shadow
reaching halfway across the yard. I take the
booklet from the girl's outstretched hand,
peruse the color photos of candy bars and
caramel-coated popcorn, pretend to read it.
I have no use for what she's selling, but I
can count the freckles on her nose, the scars
like fat worms on knobby knees that ought
to be covered on a cold day like this, when
the wind is blowing and the trees are losing
their grip on the last of their leaves. I'll take
two of these and one of those, I say, pointing,
thinking I won't eat them, but I probably will.
It's worth the coming calories to see her joy,
how hard she works to spell my name right,
taking down my information. Then she turns
and gives a thumbs-up sign to her father, who
grins like an outfielder to whom the ball has
finally come—his heart like a glove, opening.

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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 ©2017 by Terri Kirby Erickson from Becoming the Blue Heron, (Press 53, 2017). Poem reprinted by permission of Terri Kirby Erickson and the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2024 by The Poetry Foundation.