"On Sending Ted Kooser Unquiet Landscape, January 2022" By Kris Spencer

On Sending Ted Kooser Unquiet Landscape, January 2022

Tits and finches peck 
at the bare maple. 
The feeder is seeded clean.
We don’t fill it anymore,
there are mice in the yard. 
Our tree has grown out;
frizzed and leggy, we let it be. 
Birds flare and twitch around bugs 
and early buds, in the cold. 
The cage of end-twigs blooms
blue and yellow as they squabble. 
When we bought the house
there were CDs hanging 
from the branches: to scare the birds, 
the lady said. Off to Cornwall to join 
her magistrate lover. 
Our children come out 
to feel the washing frozen on the line:
a T-shirt, stiff as an axe; 
socks like two boomerangs.
My bike has weeds in the wheels. 
I sent Ted Kooser a book in an 
Amazon sleeve. All the way to Nebraska.
The tin mailbox on his
acreage; snow hard,
pushed high away from the roads.
Looking for a poem for my pupils, 
I found his work a week ago
and settled to it like a sparrow 
in a dust bath on a summer’s day.

Kris Spencer

Kris Spencer is a Headteacher, living and working in west London. His poems have been published internationally. A Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, themes central to his work are sense of place and sense of self. Something he shares with every poet.

Headshot: Mat Smith

Headshot Credit: Staff