In order to view this poem as the author intended it to appear, we suggest reading it on a computer screen or in the landscape orientation on your phone.

A Sunrise Without Clouds
Ted Kooser

It’s like a clean kitchen, isn’t it…
nearly all gleaming white,
with a lightly-scorched tea-kettle
on a back burner. How very
uninviting a day. I much prefer
those after-a-rain mornings
with enormous lasagnas of clouds
put together the evening before—
ripply noodles, lots of tomato sauce—
left out all night on the counter.

—
Ted Kooser’s most recent publication is A Man with a Rake, a chapbook from Pulley Press. Forthcoming this spring is a children’s book, Marshmallow Clouds: Two Poets at Play Among Figures of Speech, a collaboration with Connie Wanek, to be published by Candlewick Press.

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Have you read these poems:
Working on the Sermon by Dave Morrison
I See a Home by Tony Vick

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