This is Poetry Moment on WPSU – a weekly program featuring the work of contemporary Pennsylvania poets. Your host is poet and author Marjorie Maddox, a 2023 Monson Arts Fellow, author of more than 20 books, and Professor Emerita of English and Creative Writing at the Lock Haven campus of Commonwealth University.
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Welcome to Poetry Moment.
A winter walk in the woods is the perfect scenario for a “short pastoral poem,” one that romanticizes the simplicity of rural life, right? That’s what you expect from a poem with “eclogue” in its title.
Not this time. According to poet Christopher Bakken, today’s poem, “Eclogue (Winter),” is “a sort of anti-pastoral—[that] speaks to the difficulty of those dark winter months in north western Pennsylvania….” And then there’s the gun.
Christopher Bakken is the author of three books of poetry, with a fourth volume forthcoming from LSU Press in fall 2025. He has lived in Meadville, Pennsylvania for twenty-five years, while serving as Professor of English at Allegheny College. Bakken is also the author of the culinary memoir, Honey, Olives, Octopus: Adventures at the Greek Table and he serves as director of Writing Workshops in Greece: Thessaloniki and Thasos - [writingworkhopsingreece.com]
A quiet snowy day is shattered with the sound of shotgun. Even in the hills of Pennsylvania, poet Christopher Bakken witnesses what he names “the specter of gun violence.” No creature—or person—is safe.
Here’s “Eclogue (Winter)” by Christopher Bakken.
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Pacing the hill in snow, the shot I hear
is from another hill, this blood I trace
a staggered, lung-shot deer’s come from below,
the chill of such things heaving in the dusk
where even the creek has soldered to its rock.
More follow: fierce crows unstationed
east by ricochet to roost at Woodcock Dam.
These last mornings beat as hard as wings
against our stone house; a lid of rusted tin
traps the town for weeks of desperation.
Ten below. And our neighbor with his gun.
Pay attention, today’s the twenty-third
of the year, risen from its six-deep tundra
to ravage our parcel of sluggish tilth.
We dig in vain among the hard, heaped banks
for the shells he chucked, find only boot-prints
and the drooled-on shreds of black cigars.
Who wants to be the thing that he hunts next?
Cold land, your punishment is our frontier:
we skim the soup from its fat, we stalk
the house, crouch when another blast rattles
shadows off the iced limbs of the valley.
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That was “Eclogue (Winter)” by Christopher Bakken. Thanks for listening.
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Listen for Poetry Moment with Marjorie Maddox Mondays during Morning Edition and All Things Considered on WPSU. You can more episodes at wpsu.org/poetrymoment.
Our theme music is by Eric Ian Farmer.
