Ode on Small Things

Emily Rose Cole

Praise to the airplane’s early arrival, the sweet olive
fattened with gin, the stranger helping me muscle
my luggage into the bin. Praise to the unburgled
apartment, the unexploded buzzbomb that never
killed my great-grandfather, the jittering bat
released, unharmed, into the summer swelter.
Everywhere, everywhere, a wonder—sing glory
to the compassion of children. To the pastured
filly shimmying in the ryegrass, to the architecture
of eiderdown, the complex firing of a synapse.
To the cough interrupting Handel’s Messiah,
praise. Hosanna to the body’s indispensable
frailty. How vulnerable we are. How luminous. 

Emily Rose Cole is the author of Thunderhead (2020, University of Wisconsin Press) and Love & a Loaded Gun (2016, Minerva Rising). She has received awards from Jabberwock Review, Philadelphia Stories, The Orison Anthology, and the Academy of American Poets. Her poetry has appeared in American Life in Poetry, Best New Poets 2018, Poet Lore, and the Los Angeles Review, among others. She holds an MFA in poetry from Southern Illinois University and a PhD in poetry with an emphasis in Disability Studies from the University of Cincinnati.