Vox Populi
A curated webspace for Poetry, Politics, and Nature with over 20,000 daily subscribers and over 8,000 archived posts.
Laure-Anne Bosselaar: Morning Praise
For the dog, as she zig-zags along the scents
left in the yard by night’s bestiary: rats, cats,
possum, bats, skunks. For the warbler —
sending its first song giggling down the roof.
For my windows, how they glow, golden,
through the tree’s limbs. For the air,
how it yawns out dawn. Praise not God
or fate, but the weeds & leaves that soften
the earth under my steps toward the widening
light — how it sifts over everything.
Copyright 2024 Laure-Anne Bosselaar
Laure-Anne Bosselaar is a Belgian-American poet, translator, professor, and former poet laureate of Santa Barbara, California. She is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently, Lately: New and Selected Poems (Sungold, 2024) and These Many Rooms (Four Way Books, 2019). Her collection, Small Gods of Grief (BOA Editions), won the 2001 Isabella Gardner Prize for Poetry. A New Hunger, (Ausable Press 2008) was an American Library Association Notable Book in 2008. She also is the author of Artémis, a collection of French poems, published in Belgium.
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Very few capture light like Laure-Anne, it always feels new. Thank you.
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So beautiful – and that last couplet, wow! Laure-Anne makes the world a better place! Thanks for sharing this.
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Reading this poem simply lets me breathe in light and small living things, remember that they too are important. Thank you Laure-Anne and Vox Populi.
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Thank YOU!
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I read this gorgeous poem after dark and it has filled me with light✨
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Yes, a beautiful aubade.
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Lovely. We especially need this kind of loving attention to a world that seems so broken right now.
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Yes
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I’m hearing Hopkins underneath this lovely poem. =)
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Thank you–
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Perfect, even before my morning coffee.
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Yes, perfect.
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Thanks, good friend…
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Oh! This is sublime. I want a broadside of it to read each morning to start the day.
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Yes, her poems are perfect and sublime.
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Oh, I needed that this morning stuck in sterile hospital , dog with children, roommate coughing blood I bed beside the curtain. For a moment, I was able to burrow into memory of my yard and that special light Thank you.
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Hi Barbara, I agree the poem puts us in the best possible place.
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Be well soon, dear Barbara — I was in a hospital for almost 3 weeks — and know how it can gnaw at one’s heart. Sending kind, kind wishes…
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Thank you. Buoyed up by your poetry.
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Praise not God
or fate, but the weeds & leaves that soften
the earth under my steps toward the widening
light — how it sifts over everything.
I love how the natural world in its very ordinary beauty is the balm that can make life worth living. Laure-Anne is a buddha.
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Yes, she is!.
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“rectifying human things so awry…” Exactly what poetry does. Thank you, Sean.
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If Laure Ann had lived in the 15th Century, she would have been Chief Alchemist to the Duke of Burgundy. Every poem she creates is a small but incomparable jewel. How fortunate we are that she has chosen to live among us.
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Spot on, Warren.
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And praise Laure-Anne for your spirit this morning, rectifying human things so awry as you cite lively elements of the world and in so doing, cast us into certain hope of things to come.
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Dear Sean. Thank you.
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