American Life in Poetry

By Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate, 2004-2006

Wendy Videlock lives in western Colorado, where a person can stop to study what an owl has left behind without being run over by a taxi.

The Owl

Beneath her nest,
a shrew’s head,
a finch’s beak
and the bones
of a quail attest

the owl devours
the hour,
and disregards
the rest.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Reprinted from Poetry, January 2009, by permission of Wendy Videlock and the publisher. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

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