Moss

By Bruce Guernsey Bruce Guernsey

How must it be

to be moss,

that slipcover of rocks?—

imagine,

greening in the dark,

longing for north,

the silence

of birds gone south.

How does moss do it,

all day

in a dank place

and never a cough?—

a wet dust

where light fails,

where the chisel

cut the name.

Reprinted from Peripheral Vision, published by Small Poetry Press, Pleasant Hill, CA. Copyright © 1997 by Bruce Guernsey and reprinted by permission of the author, whose latest book is “The Lost Brigade,” Water Press and Media, 2005.

Source: Peripheral Vision (Small Poetry Press, 1997)

Biography

Poet, teacher, and editor, Bruce Guernsey graduated from Colgate University 1966. He later earned MAs from the University of Virginia and The John Hopkins University and a PhD from the University of New Hampshire.

Bruce Guernsey’s quiet, observant poems draw vividly upon the nature of his surroundings in the Northeast—and later Midwest—United States. In an interview with poet Diane Lockward, Guernsey notes how the move from . . .

Continue reading this biography