Jessi Peterson
Hope is the thing
we hear, or in this case don’t
when the traffic noise from Hwy 29
no longer follows the curvature of the hills,
singing down slopes, channeling
down ravines to reach us.
Hope is what we are listening for now,
the rippling trill of the crane’s return,
often flying too far up to be seen.
The soft sough of wind through the feathers
of swans as they aim for pooled snowmelt
in the fields west of town, a spot
to rest, to glean like Ruth
what’s left of last year’s harvest.
The late night yodel and yip of coyotes
from the prairie floodplain along the river,
already such consummate artists
at social distancing they hear me crack
our patio door a quarter mile away
and clam up.
The rumble of a neighbor’s truck, dropping off
a widow’s mite of wood
for my mother’s woodstove
but not dropping in.
The almost silent rasp of my pet snail eating,
just out of estivation while we go in,
his retractable teeth contending with spinach and waiting
for the grass I planted in his cage today to sprout.
Waiting like the rest of us, taking things at the pace he knows
that we don’t know yet.
Jessi Peterson is the children’s librarian in Chippewa Falls and her favorite days of the week are storytime days. She misses reading and singing and acting silly with kids at the library while we are all doing our best to tamp down COVID-19. She is a poetry reader for local literary journal Barstow and Grand (submission period open now!) and her work has appeared there as well as in Wisconsin People and Ideas, Sky Island Journal, Crab Orchard Review and the Local Lit column of Volume One. Her chapbook Century Farm is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press.