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Riches
Paulann Petersen

May I learn to be poor
like a mole snubbing
the sun’s largesse,
relying instead
on earth’s deep pockets,

or poor like the rain
with nothing to spend
but itself, not a blessed thing
to do but parcel itself out
into the smallest denominations
it can manage,

or the scent
roused by that rain,
rising from a forest floor’s
bottom line,

or those mundane stones
given—by virtue of being
in a river’s bed—
the gleam of wealth.

Let me be the meadowlark,
my throat
spent for song.

—
Paulann Petersen, Oregon Poet Laureate Emerita, has seven full-length books of poetry, most recently One Small Sun, from Salmon Poetry in Ireland. A Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, she received the 2006 Holbrook Award from Oregon Literary Arts. In 2013 she was Willamette Writer’s Distinguished Northwest Writer. The Latvian composer Eriks Esenvalds chose a poem from her book The Voluptuary as the lyric for a choral composition that’s now part of the repertoire of the Choir at Trinity College Cambridge.

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