I am honored and humbled to see one of my poems featured in former U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser’s newspaper and online column, American Life in Poetry.

“Starry night” came to me in a flash and fully formed. And if the poem is “about” anything, it is this: the safe embrace of oaks and maples and beech trees scaffolding their branches into a haven from the world beyond.

And up above leafless limbs, stars spattered across the heavens like duff dropped on the forest floor, the vastness of the universe expanding me with wonder, and the present living moment holding hands with millions of years ago in the graceful give of acorns underfoot and tiny points of starlight overhead.

The poem was first published in Modern Haiku.  My sincere thanks to editor Paul Miller for publishing the poem and to Ted Kooser for republishing it with his thoughtful commentary.