Small Wonders
Here beyond small wonders,
a million insects argue and play.
Their yellow fire travels sky and time
against indifference, asking,
others so do say, to go a different way,
a final creation to prepare,
to set an early eve ablaze.
I, at sleep, swathed in midnight cloth
hear the world crowd in toward day.
Next to me, a shiny blue-winged victim
beats back the terrors of creation.
….
This poem is from the book Here Beyond Small Wonders by Becky Boling (Finishing Line Press), and can be found at https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/here-beyond-small-wonders-by-becky-boling/
The poems in Here Beyond Small Wonders find mystery and wonder in everyday objects and settings–from Adirondack snow-covered chairs to an autumnal beach on an inland sea to a city garden between high-rise walls. Boling invites us to witness, often with irony and humor, life’s many dramas. A puppy refuses to give up a dead mouse he’s tracked to the bushes, the poet takes a shower with a large black ant, an entire neighborhood parades daily just to get a glimpse of nesting owls. Boundaries are transgressed by ordinary events, unavoidable change, and natural cataclysmic forces, and yet these poems, never morose, pay homage to the permeable worlds we all inhabit. In Here Beyond Small Wonders, there is no such thing as an insignificant life or death.
A Hoosier from Evansville, Becky Boling moved to Northfield, Minnesota, in 1983 to teach Spanish language and Latin American literature at Carleton College. She retired in 2019 as the Stephen R. Lewis, Jr. Professor of Spanish and the Liberal Arts. Her prose and poetry appear in many literary journals and anthologies. She has been Co-Poet Laureate of Northfield, has raised a family, and badly tended a garden. Here Beyond Small Wonders is her first published book of poetry.
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