[1763] An Apology

Guest poem submitted by Paramjit Oberoi, <param@>:

Forgive me
for backing over
and smashing
your red wheelbarrow.

It was raining
and the rear wiper
does not work on
my new plum-colored SUV.

I am also sorry
about the white
chickens.

	-- F. J. Bergmann

I was leafing through one of Billy Collins's anthologies of contemporary
American poetry ("180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day") when I ran
into this.  I love the haiku-like simplicity of the lines, and the random
irreverent touches ("plum-colored SUV", "white chickens").  So spare, not a
word out of place, and one gets such a clear and vivid picture of the event
when reading it.

"An Apology" was a finalist for the 2003 James Hearst Poetry Prize and
appeared in The North American Review Vol. 288, No. 2.

Frances Jean Bergmann is a web designer and artist.  She reads at spoken
word venues, and has been published in Margie-The American Journal of
Poetry, Wind, Pavement Saw, Realpoetik,in the anthology Connected: Poetry
Online In The Age Of Computers, in her own chapbooks, and has a poem
included in 180 More (Random House 2005).  In 2003 she received the Mary
Roberts Rinehart National Poetry Award; in 2004 she won the Pauline Ellis
Prose Poetry Prize with "Wall."  She lives in Madison, Wisconsin (USA), and
maintains several local poetry websites.

Biographical information from:
  http://www.madpoetry.org/madpoets/bergmann.html
  http://www.wfop.org/poets/bergmann.html
  http://www.fibitz.com/biostate.html

-param

PS. Here's the original:
  http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/83.html

[this poem is archived, accessible and awaiting your comments at]
http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/1760.html
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