Giving Thanks in All Things

Ready to Make Friends with Poetry? ⟶

Susan Cowger confesses she was the ‘black sheep’ in the family, not quite fitting into the mold of family vocations–nurses, pharmacists, sensible people. Instead, her first language was art, a calling that led to a BA in Fine Art (1977) from Montana State University and subsequent MFA in Poetry with a secondary emphasis in Art…
The ‘shuff, shuff, scritch’ of my sneakers against the damp leaves interrupts the sound of quiet on this woodsy walk. A flicker’s cry breaks in high above while I step over the dank patterned tree life at my feet. The path before me is almost entirely covered in debris revealing just the smallest glimmers of emerald…
I sit outside on the deck in my spot where I hear better and I see an eagle in the distant sky (not these. smile.) He’s floating, soaring, up, up and up… He seldom flaps his wings, gently resting on invisible currents of air, shifting directions by a slight tilt of his wing feathers in…
I came as a witness, the extra listener, to deflect and defend, maybe decide what this grief will look like. The suited man at the table tells us there are options for this sort of thing. My daughter L holds a tissue, I poise my pen at the paper before me. Burying a child is…
“What if there were no poetry? What if all life were prose? Some people wouldn’t mind. One friend told me her son didn’t know how to do imaginative play. He lined up his action figures and then shrugged and walked away. He didn’t know what else to do. Poetry gives you an idea of what…
I love to learn new things. I’ve been a teacher off and on (mostly on) since about 1984. I tried a couple of times to find something else to do, but God keeps calling me back to the elementary classroom. Now I’m ‘just a sub’, but it is the best job ever. If I had…