American Life in Poetry
Billy Collins, who lives in New York, is one of our country’s most admired poets, and this snapshot of a winter day is reminiscent of those great Chinese poems that on the virtue of their clarity and precision have survived for a couple of thousand years. His most recent book of poetry is “Aimless Love: New and Selected Poems” (Random House, 2013).
Winter
A little heat in the iron radiator,
the dog breathing at the foot of the bed,
and the windows shut tight,
encrusted with hexagons of frost.
I can barely hear the geese
complaining in the vast sky,
flying over the living and the dead,
schools and prisons, and the whitened fields.
Poem copyright 2014 by Billy Collins from Poetry East, No. 82 (2014), and is reprinted by permission of the author and publisher. American Life in Poetry is supported by The Poetry Foundation and the English department at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.