- April is National Poetry Month
- Join the Vorhoff Library as we celebrate a woman poet each day during the month!
- Nebraska Poetry
- Posted April 6, 2009
Sometimes we forget about the women whose lives are far from our own, women who live in places we've never been, whether they live far away or simply in a "flyover state". All My Grandmothers Could Sing: Poems by Nebraska Women, edited by Judith Sornberger, opens a window into the lives of women in a state I daresay you probably have not thought about in a very long time. Some of these poems are about Nebraska history, some about experiences common to Nebraskans, some about getting to know Nebraska. But, like all good poetry, it is really about the universality of human experience. Today's poem is about the beauty and magic of creating something by hand, nothing more; but imagining the subject of the poem on the vast Nebrasaka prairie makes her seem more brave, somehow, even perhaps made more resiliant by her craft.
Poem of the day:
A Woman at Her Wheel
Nancy Peters
A woman takes her spinning wheel
down by the creek in the evening
to spin the last light away, weaving
light sunstruck from the water
like silver thread turned with the woo.
Tonight she spins the straw
of ordinary things into gold.
Her fingers find the ancient magic
of making parts into a whole,
the simple lamb's wool turned resplendent,
touched and tamed exquisite as silk,
a silk once twirled around a moth
that pressed its wings against a curved wall,
breathing its moth-breath into the silk.
And how can this be? —
is there more a halo around her hands
than upon this woman's hair,
more lightness in those fingers
tahn in her frail body, her line-drawn face?
Something of youth steals through
her slender wrists, the quick-stepping fingers,
as if she moved too quick for age to catch her,
spinning years away, making
her own gold keeping of this day;
light gone silver down the stream,
light gone silver down her hair
that falls down to her waist. 
Photo by tsmyther
