Poetry Corner

[assistant editor's note: this month, we're pleased to present works by 6th-grade track standout Amanda Lockett and Hartshorne master's competitor Lennie Tucker.]

RUNNING

R eady go! shouts the official, the gun goes off.

U nder pressure your heart jumps and you start running.

N ervousness overcomes you as you look at the first hill and a pain shoots into your stomach. As you run farther and further the course seems

N ever ending. You struggle to go on,

I magining the finish line and the prize you hope to win. The finish line is

N ow in view. Happiness rushes through your body. You're

G etting closer and closer. You start sprinting and fly by the finish, relieved that the race is now over.

-- Amanda Lockett

We Are Nearer to Spring...

I took a run down Loop Road, today. The plows hadn't been out there. I was warm, doing what I love most, and seeing and hearing the world at its most lovely.

Trees felled in spring a few years ago leaned against their younger or luckier fellow softwoods, pick-up sticks left by the playful Giant Storm. Everything horizontal, half-horizontal, or crotched held snow accumulated from the last three or four storms, and each of those storms -- I don't need to tell you -- had presented us with a foot of snow.

Funny, how death in the woods showed most beautiful. But trees don't go willingly. Now and again, they protest with pops and snaps. I stopped just in case I might truly hear the crash of a tree in the forest, and see what would have to be impressive, even terrible.

New snow fell as I ran. In front of the dark curtain of dense slim wands of the woods, dime-size snowflakes floated straight down. I love the blessing of the silence of Mother Nature and I think of the prints of Currier and Ives. They were neater, however.

The wind picked up or I turned into it, and the lovely snow screen suddenly looked like an endless alley and I realized how alone I was. I stopped to try to spy a bird which sang and then, to try to find the one which answered it.

Birdsong "in the dark of December?"

"We are nearer to Spring

Than we were in September."

--Lennie Tucker

[Credits: a fragment of poem is taken from "I Heard a Bird Sing," by Oliver Herford, Scholastic Book Services, 1973. This piece originally appeared in the Baldwinsville Messenger, Jan. 11, 2001.]