Saturday’s Poem: A House of Readers

This poem by Jim Wayne Miller seemed appropriate today because I am thinking of my daughter, who at this very moment is at the Hay-on-Wye Festival, bliss for bookish types. That's her in the picture above, taken in her middle school years at the house of a cousin in Seattle. The pose remains typical to this day: head down, book in progress, wherever she happens to be.

A HOUSE OF READERS by Jim Wayne Miller

At 9:42 on this May morning

the children’s rooms are concentrating too.

Like a tendril growing toward the sun, Ruth

moves her book into a wedge of light

that settled on the floor like a butterfly.

She turns a page.

Fred is immersed in magic, cool

as a Black Angus belly-deep in a farm pond.

The only sounds:pages turning softly.

This is the quietness

of bottomland where you can hear only the young corn

growing, where a little breeze stirs the blades

and then breathes in again.

I mark my place.

I listen like a farmer in the rows.