United States, (b. 1952)
Memory Gardens
- They’re spraying hog urine on the fields today.
- You can smell it twenty five miles away.
- It casts a pungent smell that lingers for hours.
- It gathers inside the barns, saffron and steaming,
- streaming in gallons down built-in channels
- to reservoirs beneath the floor.
- Outside of town in the nursing home
- a hundred faces appear at the windows
- like Christmas flames.
- They are growing dangerously close
- to nothing with a passion,
- Grant Wood, the painter, was right.
- They are hypnotized by the tractor’s ambling
- back and forth across the rows,
- and finally they are glad to smell this powerful smell
- above their own,
- although they would call it their own.
About the Poet:
Chard deNiord, United States, (b. 1952), is a poet, educator and writer. He attended Lynchburg College, earning a BA in religious studies. He later received a Master of Divinity from Yale Divinity School, and a Master of Fine Arts from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. In 1998, deNiord began teaching at Providence College. He retired from there in 2020, and is now Professor Emeritus of English and Creative Writing.
Poet Laureate of Vermont (2015–2019), deNiord has also been a Poetry Fellow at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and the Allan Collins Scholar in Poetry at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.
He is a recipient of a Pushcart Prize, and his poems have been included in the anthologies Pushcart Prize XXII (1998), Best American Poetry (1999), Best of the Prose Poem (2000), American Religious Poems (2006), and American Poetry Now (2007). [DES-07/22]
Additional information:
- More about Chard deNiord at: https://www.charddeniord.com/