To a Bluesman
Once someone did you such a wrong
you wrote yourself a sorrow-song
that others, wronged or not, now prize—
and so your sorrow never dies.
~
Robert West grew up in Henderson County in western North Carolina, and now lives in Starkville, Mississippi, where he teaches in the Department of English at Mississippi State University. His poems have appeared in Christian Science Monitor, Poetry, Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry, The Best American Nonrequired Reading (2013), and elsewhere. His poetry chapbook is Convalescent (Finishing Line Press, 2011). With Jonathan Greene he is co-editor of Succinct: The Broadstone Anthology of Short Poems (Broadstone Books, 2013).
~
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