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Column 820

Clearly

Intro by Ted Kooser
12.06.2020

James Crews, the author of this week’s poem, is the edi­tor of a fine anthol­o­gy from Green Writ­ers Press called Heal­ing the Divide: Poems of Kind­ness and Con­nec­tion, much need­ed in our trou­bled world. Here, as I see it, he gra­cious­ly pays his respects to William Car­los Williams, our great poet of the local and ordi­nary, who once wrote about the plea­sure of eat­ing all the plums his wife had left in the refrig­er­a­tor. His newest book is Blue­bird.

Clearly

To see clearly,
not needing a drink
or pill or puff
of any pipe
to know I’m alive.
To come home,
peel off sandals
and step onto
the cool tile floor
needing only
the rush of water
over strawberries
I picked myself
and then a knife
to trim the dusty
green heads
from each one,
to watch them
gleam cleanly
in a colander
in a patch of sun
near the sink.

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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 ©2020 by James Crews, "Clearly," from Bluebird, (Green Writers Press, 2020). Poem reprinted by permission of James Crews and the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2024 by The Poetry Foundation.