The Giant Slide

By Ted Kooser b. 1939 Ted Kooser

Beside the highway, the Giant Slide

with its rusty undulations lifts

out of the weeds. It hasn’t been used

for a generation. The ticket booth

tilts to that side where the nickels shifted

over the years. A chain link fence keeps out

the children and drunks. Blue morning glories

climb halfway up the stairs, bright clusters

of laughter. Call it a passing fancy,

this slide that nobody slides down now.

Those screams have all gone east

on a wind that will never stop blowing

down from the Rockies and over the plains,

where things catch on for a little while,

bright leaves in a fence, and then are gone.

Ted Kooser, “The Giant Slide” from One World at a Time. Copyright © 1985 by Ted Kooser. All rights are controlled by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, www.upress.pitt.edu. Used by permission of University of Pittsburgh Press.

Source: One World At A Time (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985)

Biography

Poet and essayist Ted Kooser is known for his honest, accessible verse that celebrates the quotidian and captures a vanishing way of life. Brad Leithauser wrote in the New York Times Book Review that, “Whether or not he originally set out to…[Kooser’s] become, perforce, an elegist.” Populated by farmers, family ancestors, and heirlooms, Kooser’s poems reflect his abiding interest in the past, but escape nostalgia in part because . . .

Continue reading this biography