Doug Anderson: The Wind Comes Up
…the soldiers
dismount and go
house to house,
come back out and sit
in the shade.
Michael Simms: All Time Most Popular Posts in Vox Populi (2014-2025)
Vox Populi was founded on April 1, 2014 when Nisha Gupta and I met for coffee and decided to start a website to support the anti-fracking activists in Western Pennsylvania.
Doug Anderson: Memorial Day
It’s only old Herman sitting a few yards off in the recliner
who looks beyond them into a burning village where a marine
drags a wounded man by his heels behind a tank for cover
and the tank backs up and runs over them both.
Doug Anderson: Morning Prayer
I am an eternal innocent: I believe in love,
I believe in the ability of human beings
to transcend their repetitive ignorance.
Doug Anderson: Carnivale
Saw them moving through the ground fog
like fly-casters moving against the stream
and the moon rolling with them
in the spun glass of it
Doug Anderson: Dear Children
…all you’ve got to do is open a book like a door and descend the winding staircase down to the underground river and watch the reflection of the water wavering on the walls…
Doug Anderson: Charon
The boat came by my bed, Charon poling through the murk. Get in, He said, and so we drifted through a night of broken trees and burning cars.
Doug Anderson: Underneath the sequined day there are tunnels
We enter them in sleep, hang our masks
on a hook and our names are erased.
Robert Frost: The Fear
A lantern light from deeper in the barn
Shone on a man and woman in the door
And threw their lurching shadows on a house
Near by, all dark in every glossy window.
Doug Anderson: Ghost
The old man finally just went away
to live in the mountains. Two goats,
a dog for company. The wind
made a harp of the pines.
Doug Anderson: Distance
She said my poems had emotion in them
as if they might have syphilis.
Doug Anderson: We Get Old, We Get Sick
How we stumble, are glib
in the face of our fear
when we might show
our own raw heart
Doug Anderson: What if I wrote a poem
About being seventy-seven
and trying not
to speculate how long I’ve got left
Doug Anderson: Be Whole Again Beyond Confusion
The young blame us for everything that is wrong
with the world, as if we’d plotted it that way
just to torment them, as if poisoned
the very land we’re standing on. Some of us did.
