Ted Kooser, U.S. poet laureate (2004–6) and winner of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, is an emeritus presidential professor of English at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. He is the author of dozens of books, including Kindest Regards: New and Selected Poems, The Wheeling Year: A Poet’s Field Book (Nebraska, 2014), and Delights & Shadows. His newest book, Cotton Candy: Poems Dipped Out of the Air (Nebraska, 2022), was published earlier this year.
December 7th is National Cotton Candy Day! This sugary treat is popular at carnivals and recalls childhood days filled with magic and excitement. To celebrate National Cotton Candy Day, enjoy a sweet excerpt of two poems from Ted Kooser’s Cotton Candy. His objective is to catch whatever comes to him, to snatch it out of the air in words, rhythms, and cadences, the way a cotton candy vendor dips an airy puff out of a cloud of spun sugar and hands it to his customer. Poems written in fun and now shared with the reader, Kooser’s playful and magical confections charm and delight.
Melon
By the time we discovered it under the vines
it was too ripe to pick, its down side soft
and leaking bees, so we left it, a pale yellow
partly deflated, baggy old birthday balloon,
though we reeled in the coarse nets of vine
for the compost heap. All winter that melon
bobbed like a float in the slow tides of snow,
losing its color, and by spring it was hollow,
translucent, a shell from which something
had pecked its way out and was gone
like the past, leaving a trickle of seeds.
One Cloud
In a room with a high, vaulted ceiling,
glass all the way up into the gable,
I watched a cloud pass by four windows
of identical size, just a puff of cloud
no bigger than a hand that might dabble
the smooth blue surface of a pond
while someone else rowed, the only cloud
on an otherwise clear blue autumn morning,
drifting into, then out of the first frame,
and after a brief pause while out of sight
behind a few inches of wall, drifting over,
or onto the pane of the second window,
where I found myself moving my head
to slow it, to hold it a few moments longer
before it pulled free, disappearing before
floating out onto the third, then the fourth,
where each time I slowed it a little,
and then, as if it had never been, that cloud,
which had for a few seconds floated over
just one of my mornings, gently rippling
the glass of my windows, was gone.
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