Michael Collier
Three in a group, then one coming from a distance
to make four dividing into two scavenging pairs.

They waddle like ducks, dibble like robins.
This close to the earth they have nothing to say.

And yet as they bobble in a hands-behind-back
colloquy of feints and nods they are the ankle boots

of an idea gone missing, their laces threaded
through eyelets but left untied, accountants

of random expenditures, connoisseurs
of the worm's catacomb of waste; they limp eastward,

toward the mountains, covered in contractor bag
capes, one wiry boot then the other on the ground.

If they would stay just where they are all morning,
they'd be the monument to the history they're looking for.
from the book THE MISSING MOUNTAIN / The University of Chicago Press
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"Poet Maya Angelou, the First Black Woman to be Featured on a U.S. Quarter"

"This week, the U.S. Mint began circulating quarters featuring an image of poet and activist Maya Angelou. It's the first coin issued in a series celebrating the achievements of American women. Angelou appears with arms outstretched and a bird in flight behind her. Maya Angelou was the first Black woman to write and perform a poem at a presidential inauguration. She is now the first Black woman to be featured on a quarter."

via NPR
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What Sparks Poetry: 
Aaron Anstett on James Wright's "Eisenhower’s Visit to Franco, 1959"

"This poem, at once narrative, lyrical, and political, led me to more James Wright poems and to Spanish poets beyond Machado, particularly in the bilingual anthology Roots and Wings, which I discovered in my high school library along with the still-powerful Hayden Carruth anthology, The Voice That Is Great Within Us. From there followed a continuing lifetime of delight, bafflement, and discovery in poems."
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