Ted Kooser, former U.S. Poet Laureate, has featured two poems, “Swift,” and “Mercy,” by Denison Professor David Baker in Kooser’s “American Life in Poetry” publication.
Mercy
Small flames afloat in blue duskfall, beneath trees
anonymous and hooded, the solemn trees—by ones
and twos and threes we go down to the water’s level edge
with our candles cupped and melted into little pie-tins
to set our newest loss free. Everyone is here.
Everyone is wholly quiet in the river’s hush and appropriate dark.
The tenuous fires slip from our palms and seem to settle
in the stilling water, but then float, ever so slowly,
in a loose string like a necklace’s pearls spilled,
down the river barely as wide as a dusty road.
No one is singing, and no one leaves—we stand back
beneath the grieving trees on both banks, bowed but watching,
as our tiny boats pass like a long history of moons
reflected, or like notes in an elder’s hymn, or like us,
death after death, around the far, awakening bend.
