Listen!

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Apropos of nothing in particular, I asked my buddy Rob on city desk: “You have this thing all figured out?”

He said, “It’s gonna take at least another 45 minutes.”

Sure, my question was small talk, and his mind was on the day at hand and his story budget for the next day’s newspaper.

I immediatately thought of a poem I read many years ago:

Limited

I AM riding on a limited express, one of the crack trains
of the nation.
Hurtling across the prairie into blue haze and dark air
go fifteen all-steel coaches holding a thousand people.
(All the coaches shall be scrap and rust and all the men
and women laughing in the diners and sleepers shall
pass to ashes.)
I ask a man in the smoker where he is going and he
answers: “Omaha.”

– Carl Sandburg

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A Carl Sandburg bibliography
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Dust of Snow

The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.

– Robert Frost (1923)

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A Robert Frost bibliography
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What is your favorite winter poem?

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Sal Buttaci and Jeff Travers — poetry reading, followed by open mic (public invited to read one or two poems) — Princeton Public Library, 205 Center Street, Princeton, WV 24740, Thursday, Dec. 3, 2009, 6 p.m. Phone: (304) 487-5045. Free and open to the public.

Doug Van Gundy — poetry reading, Monongalia Arts Center, 107 High Street, downtown Morgantown, W.Va. 26507 (beside Hotel Morgan), Thursday, Dec. 17, 2009, 7 p.m. Phone: (304) 292-3325. Free and open to the public.

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