Ted Kooser

Ted Kooser (1939-  ) is a poet and essayist, a Presidential Professor of English at The University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He served as the U.S. Poet Laureate from 2004-2006, and his book Delights & Shadows won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for poetry.

Those Summer Evenings

My father would, with a little squeak

and a shudder in the water pipes,

turn on the garden hose, and sprinkle

honeysuckle bushes clipped

to window height, so that later,

as we slept atop our rumpled sheets

with windows open to the scritch

of crickets, whatever breeze

might flirt its way between

our house and the neighbors’

would brush across the honeysuckle,

sweet and wet, and keep us cool.

— Ted Kooser