Poem of the Week | May 16, 2016

This week we feature another poem from our new Spring 2016 Editors’ Prize issue, 39.1. Patricia Hooper’s fourth book of poetry, Separate Flights, was awarded the Anita Claire Sharf Award and will be published later this year by the University of Tampa Press. Her poems have appeared in The Hudson Review, The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, The Yale Review, The Iowa Review, Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review and other publications. A Michigan native, she now lives in North Carolina.
 
Author’s note:

“My Junco” happened in life almost the way I wrote it. I wanted to capture the bird’s beauty and dignity and suggest something of its part in nature’s design. As a gardener I am always seeing how old leaves and grass clippings are transformed into soil in which something else grows. Why not these tiny bones? I called the poem “My Junco” because I felt that it was up to me to honor it and place it where it might become again a part of nature’s cycle. The light, airy blossoms of Whirlwind anemones often seem to be fluttering as if about to fly, so that is the plant I chose.