Poetry Friday: Creatures, by Billy Collins

Today's pick is for my daughters: for Anne-with-an-e, who at age 3 (and with the imagination of a poet) often saw faces in the whorling woodgrain of the doors in our house.

I was a sympathetic audience for her fears -- like Anne and Billy Collins in today's poem Creatures, the faces looked to me like something melting and Norwegian from Edvard Munch.

And today's pick is for Betsy, too, who did not react as Billy, Anne and I did.  Rather, Betsy has always seen sunny images in woodgrain -- smiling faces, kittens, and the like. She has the imagination of a poet, too.  Just a happier and less disturbed poet. 

Creatures

by Billy Collins

Hamlet noticed them in the shapes of clouds,

but I saw them in the furniture of childhood,

creatures trapped under surfaces of wood,

one submerged in a polished sideboard,

one frowning from a chair-back,

another howling from my mother’s silent bureau,

locked in the grain of maple, frozen in oak.

I would see these presences, too,

in a swirling pattern of wallpaper

or in the various greens of a porcelain lamp,

each looking so melancholy, so damned,

some peering out at me as if they knew

all the secrets of a secretive boy.

(Read the rest here.) 

The Poetry Friday round up is at Liz in Ink.