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

Most of us have received the delayed news of the death of a family member or friend, and perhaps have reflected on lost opportunities.

Here’s a fine poem by J. T. Ledbetter, who lives in California but grew up on the Great Plains.

Crossing Shoal Creek

The letter said you died on your tractor

crossing Shoal Creek.

There were no pictures to help the memories fading

like mists off the bottoms that last day on the farm

when I watched you milk the cows,

their sweet breath filling the dark barn as the rain

that wasn’t expected sluiced through the rain gutters.

I waited for you to speak the loud familiar words

about the weather, the failed crops —

I would have talked then, too loud, stroking the Holstein

moving against her stanchion —

but there was only the rain on the tin roof,

and the steady swish-swish of milk into the bright bucket

as I walked past you, so close we could have touched.

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 ©2010 by J.T. Ledbetter, and reprinted from his most recent book of poetry, Underlying Premises, Lewis Clark Press, 2010, by permission of J.T. Ledbetter and the publisher. 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.