Margaret Hasse

Margaret Hasse (1950- ) was born in Aberdeen, South Dakota, in 1950. Soon after, her family moved to Vermillion, South Dakota, where her father was on the mathematics department faculty and also taught astronomy at the University of South Dakota. Margaret’s mother, Gladys Irene Elizabeth Hasse, was a life-long diarist and poet who published in journals. Hasse received a B.A. from Stanford University in 1973, and an M.A. from the University of Minnesota in 1983, both in English. She is author of five collections of poetry, including Stars Above, Stars Below (1984), In a Sheep’s Eye, Darling (1988), Milk and Tides (2008), Earth’s Appetite (2013), and Between Us (2016).

Audubon’s The Birds of America, Color-Plate 211

If you, too, dream to be born again

as a bird, wouldn’t you want to be

a great blue heron, rare vagrant

wintering in the Azores and coastal Spain,

snacking on shrimp while wading

on long, beautiful legs? And if

you loved your life as a human who

sheltered in a small house by a lake, you

could summer there again, nesting

in the white pine, fishing on the shore

in the blue Zen of stillness when early

morning ambers the eastern sky.

— Margaret Hasse