[1305] Poem in Thanks

Guest poem submitted by Sashidhar Dandamudi, <sashi@>:

Lord Whoever, thank you for this air
I'm about to in- and exhale, this hutch
in the woods, the wood for fire,
the light-both lamp and the natural stuff
of leaf-back, fern, and wing.
For the piano, the shovel
for ashes, the moth-gnawed
blankets, the stone-cold water
stone-cold: thank you.
Thank you, Lord, coming for
to carry me here -- where I'll gnash
it out, Lord, where I'll calm
and work, Lord, thank you
for the goddamn birds singing!

	-- Thomas Lux

This poem opens Garrison Keillor's (the funny guy who reads poems on NPR
and of course hosts "The Praire Home Companion") anthology 'Good Poems'.
The section is called "O Lord!".

In the preface of this book, Keillor says these poems were chosen for
"their wit, their frankness, their passion and their utter clarity in
the face of everything else a person has to deal with at 7 a.m." He also
goes on say that  "For writers, it's enough to refer to somebody having
written a good poem. Somebody else can worry about greatness."

I concur wholly with Keillor's view for this indeed is a good poem. And
which I have, since I have read it, passed on to other friends and
remembered it on early mornings when I heard "the goddamn birds
singing".

Also since I personally know Thomas Lux, I would like to share this poem
with other Ministrel-ites, as an introduction to a body of work by a
deligthful poet and person.

Thank you.
Sashi.

Bio:

THOMAS LUX, born in Northampton, Massachusettes in 1946, is a member of
the writing faculty and director of the MFA Program in Poetry at Sarah
Lawrence College. In recent years he has been on the graduate faculties
of Boston University, the University of California (Irvine), Columbia
University, Warren Wilson College, and the Universities of Houston,
Iowa, and Michigan. A former Guggenheim Fellow, the recipient of three
NEA grants, Lux won the Kingsley Tufts Award for his book of poems,
Split Horizon, and has been a finalist for both the Los Angeles Times
Book Award in poetry and the 1998 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize.