Ted Kooser, US Poet Laureate from 2004 to 2006. Photo by UNL Publications and Photography.

I’ve mentioned before how much I like poems that take the time to carefully observe people at work. Here David St. John, who lives in California, gives us a snapshot of workers protecting an orchard.

Peach Fires

Out in the orchards the dogs stood

Almost frozen in the bleak spring night

& Mister dragged out into the rows

Between his peach trees the old dry limbs

Building at regular intervals careful pyres

While the teeth of the dogs chattered & snapped

& the ice began to hang long as whiskers

From the globes along the branches

& at his signal we set the piles of branches ablaze

Tending each carefully so as not to scorch

The trees as we steadily fed those flames

Just enough to send a rippling glow along

Those acres of orchard where that body—

Sister Winter – had been held so wisely to the fire

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2002 by David St. John, whose most recent book of poetry is The Face: A Novella in Verse, Harper Collins, 2004. Poem reprinted from The Place That Inhabits Us, Sixteen Rivers Press, 2010, by permission of David St. John and the publishers. Introduction copyright © 2011 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. They do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.