Daniel Bourne
Book Cover with Landscape
Across the white snow and underneath the white snow
cornstalks scattered like bones the bones like cornstalks
the faces upturned and the faces buried
the crows that wander about are like the black stitches
when we have not yet closed up the wound
If this were a children's book
the stick figures would wear a happy hat.
but on this book—
they are only sticks
sticks drawn without names
Bio
Daniel Bourne's books include The Household Gods, Where No One Spoke the Language, and Talking Back to the Exterminator, forthcoming from Regal House as the 2022 recipient of its Terry J. Cox Poetry Award. His poems have also appeared in Guernica, Conduit, APR, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. Since 1980, he has also lived in Poland several times, including 1985-87 on a Fulbright for the translation of younger Polish poets and, most recently, in 2018 and 2019. His translations appear in many literary journals, and a book of his translations of Polish Poet Bronisław Maj, The Extinction of the Holy City, is forthcoming from Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press.