Blind

I gaze upon the beauty of this world

Endearing faces, majestic mountains, abundant colors;

Watching humanity flow together.

And nature’s beauty unfurl

Staring into the eyes of one I love,

Truly seeing into their gentle and adoring soul.

And yet, sometimes I wish I was blind

Free from all the slightly prejudices of mankind.

No longer able to see the color of one’s skin

No longer able to judge a book by its cover-

Only to learn and be influenced by the endeavors unseen.

And to avoid the distortion of beauty

That so often is created by our human eyes

And finally be free; living by sound, feeling, touch and smell.

No longer subjected to the seen world

But embraced in the arms of the unseen.

- Michaela Miller 

Michaela Miller is a senior at Jackson Hole High School.

Rhyme

Air an instrument of the tongue,
The tongue an instrument
Of the body, the body
An instrument of spirit,
The spirit a being of the air.

A bird the medium of its song.
A song a world, a containment
Like a hotel room, ready
For us guests who inherit
Our compartment of time there.

In the Cornell box, among
Ephemera as its element,
The preserved bird—a study
In spontaneous elegy, the parrot
Art, mortal in its cornered sphere.

The room a stanza rung
In a laddered filament
Clambered by all the unsteady
Chambered voices that share it,

Each reciting I too was here—

In a room, a rhyme, a song.
In the box, in books: each element
An instrument, the body
Still straining to parrot
The spirit, a being of air.

- Robert Pinsky 

Former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky visited Jackson as part of Teton County Library's Page to Podium series.

Bend of Light in A Mountain Meadow

No, not likely, or so she seemed

to imply with a nod. A fritillary

wandered nearby, bounced over a lupine

and became lost in indian paintbrush.

We always departed by passing one another

and settling in another part of a meadow.

Some said they all seemed routine

from a certain distance, but we noticed

subtleties in the bend of light

and settled in different hues.


- Kirk Vandyke 

Kirk Vandyke is an entomologist living in Laramie, Wyoming. This poem originally appeared in the Spring 2011 volume of the Jackson Hole Review.