WRITER’S SHACK
I know I’ve read a really fine poem when both my head and heart respond. The first line of Al Starkey’s remarkable poem “What in the World” grabs me because the clouds are killing time. And when he then compares those clouds to yoked oxen, I’m all in. But it’s the last three lines, with their layers of resolve and hope and possibility, that make me cry. They are both moving and thoughtful. And they remind me that poetry is, as Robert Frost put it, “when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found its words.” A matter of both the head and the heart. In balance. As one. —Lauren Wolk
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