By Muriel Nelson
after Carl Sandburg
Dear diapered cloud bottoms.
Sleepy nursery in the sky.
White wind noise, now blessedly shushed.
I want to write with your light,
ice storm,
with your slick piles of chimes.
And when forecasters call, as they do,
for rain’s downfall, I’ll come
with cats on little fog feet.
Let’s silence the amen corner,
that radio’s adverts and sackbuts,
to brighten the world.
In Psalm 19, day tells,
but night shows.
Amen to the showy night.
Muriel Nelson’s publications include Part Song, winner of the Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Prize (Bear Star Press), and Most Wanted, winner of the ByLine Chapbook Award (ByLine Press). Nominated four times for the Pushcart Prize, her poems have appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Cortland Review, Four Way Review, Front Porch Journal, Hunger Mountain, Massachusetts Review, National Poetry Review, The New Republic, Northwest Review, Pebble Lake Review, Ploughshares, Prick of the Spindle, Seneca Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, Superstition Review, and others, and on Verse Daily and Poetry Daily. Italian Culture published her critical essay on Eugenio Montale. She holds master's degrees from the University of Illinois School of Music and the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers.