Ted Kooser

My wife and I live on 62 hilly, wooded and rocky acres in eastern Nebraska, once part of a 180 acre 19th century homestead farm. Our corner of the original property includes the old barn and granary, and the original small farmhouse was absorbed by the much larger house that we built around and over it. Our property has thousands of trees interrupted by patches of prairie grass.  We do no farming, and have given what we have over to wildlife— deer, turkeys, coyotes, and the usual smaller animals, field mice, rabbits, opossums, raccoons. Birdwatchers tell us that there are around 65 species of birds here, though I can only identify about twenty of those. So we live surrounded by plant life and animals that thrive upon plants. We garden, of course, and grow tomatoes, kale, okra and melons.  I have written hundreds of poems about our surroundings right down to the look of a small leaf suspended from a thread of spider silk.  I am what we might term a “descriptive poet,” and my work is in describing what I witness. My poem, “A Red Leaf,” shows me meditating about just one of the millions of leaves that fall here, not one alike.