At the Great Door of Morning: Selected Poems and Translations

By Robert Hedin

• Featured on NPR’s “All Things Considered”
• Featured in Ted Kooser’s nationally syndicated American Life in Poetry column
• Anthologized in Good Poems, edited by Garrison Keillor
• Anthologized in Poetry 180, edited by Billy Collins
• Founder and director of the Anderson Center
• Kay Sexton Award winner from the Minnesota Book Awards
• Former Poet Laureate!... (of Red Wing, Minnesota)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
• Release date: May 8, 2018
• ISBN: 9781619321687

Book preview

Selected Poems, Part 1

Moving Out with the Finches

for Sherod Santos

This morning I’m going to drag my desk

Out into the backyard and set it down

By the birdbath, near the flower bed

Overgrown with weeds. And the black

Leather armchair where I like to read

I’ll lug out under the two young maples,

Along with the Persian rug, the tall

Goosenecked lamp, the books, the CDs,

Even the huge unruly fern in the corner.

I’m going to haul it all outside, out

Into the open air where it’s quiet,

Where I won’t be bothered,

Out by the lilacs, the trellis of roses,

Near the blossoming fruit trees

Where they like to gather, the finches,

Those little birds, the color of pollen.

My Mother’s Hats

She kept them high on the top shelf,

In boxes big as drums—

Bright, crescent-shaped boats

With little fishnets dangling down—

And wore them with her best dress

To teas, coffee parties, department stores.

What a lovely catch, my father used to say,

Watching her sail off into the afternoon waters.

Raising the Titanic

I spent the winter my father died down in the basement,

under the calm surface of the floorboards, hundreds

of little plastic parts spread out like debris

on the table. And for months while the snow fell

and my father sat in the big chair by the Philco dying,

I worked my way up deck by deck, story by