The Poetry Box
Artist: John Frechette
Curated by: Matt Daly, Director of Jackson Hole Writers
Location: East Broadway in front of Persephone Bakery
Date: 2010
Medium: Wood, glass, pipe
Partners: Jackson Hole Public Art and the Jackson Hole Writers
Sponsored by: MADE and Mountain Dandy
The Poetry Box celebrates the poetic voices in Jackson Hole with free poems. Stop by, pick up a poem, enjoy, and share.
Poetry box lives on East Broadway adjacent to the Greenspace on the Block. Curated poems are regularly distributed to the box. An archive of Poetry Box poems lives at, jhpublicart.org
Anyone in Jackson Hole can submit poems for consideration at any time by emailing jhpoetrybox@gmail.com. Postcard preference is given to poems of 50 words or less. Submissions are curated seasonally.
To share a Poem you love, record a short video or audio of yourself reading the poem wherever you like. Email the recording to jhpoetrybox@gmail.com, and then put a stamp on your Poetry Box card and mail it.
History
The Poetry Box was created in 2010 by local artist John Frechette and is curated by local poet and Director of Jackson Hole Writers Matt Daly. The Poetry Box was the brainchild of arts writer and advocate Meg Daly (indeed the sister of current curator Matt Daly) and was initially implemented as a collaborative project between Jackson Hole Public Art, Teton County Library, the Jackson Hole Review and the Jackson Hole Writers Conference.
Instagram | Facebook | Annual support from MADE and Mountain Dandy
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Walking with Sparrows
this morning lifting
from mud in lilt
of flight the rise
and fall of feathers
ruddy notes of spring
intersecting the slant
of a late May
snow squallmyself lately divorced
from direction bowing
to aimlessness bound
now to spring and sparrows
their stuttered eagerness
to graze the margins
to scatter up in fear
or joy and down
across the green
meadowWritten by Marylee White
JUNE 2025 -
Evidence
I flew here on the wings of fringed sage,
fed by pollen of Pinyon trees.
I chose to jump, without preparation,
trusting the natural world to carry my weightless body.From above, I saw painted canyons
carved by ancient streams,
swam in rivers through wildflower banks.
Laughing, that anything was ever taken so seriously.I woke the next day with the scent of primrose
on my fingertips, dust of pollen under my nails.
A poet can tell a story so well you’re not sure
whether it’s real or not, but I have evidence.Written by Christine Stevens
MAY 2025 -
Cut Lilies
My mother sent me Easter Lilies,
it being Holy Week, and me so far from home —
two stalks raising from a plastic pot, trumpeting their bloom.All week long, and silently, I meditated on the mysteries embodied in the flowers, who through long dormancy derive their power.
Their brilliance was the radiance of peace: my heart in bloom, increased.
But soon, vacation ended; and I returned again to other things. I set the lilies in their little pot beneath my window’s opened panes. They begam to wither. First gradually, as with disease.
I tried to give them water, but only seemed to drown the roots. I lit a lamp to dry the soil,, but still they withered, failed — until finally I could do nothing more but abandon them, cracked, half-open, to the sun, to mend the cultivation I’d undone.
The sun shed light upon the lilies. They wilted more, and still. Their dying was the slow untying of my peace, the heart consumed with grief — until leaving them along was all that I could bear.
This evening, all but two blossoms dangle lifeless, dry and brown. I search the last still supple stalks with tentative fingertips. I cut them at the roots.
And bring them — fragrant, yet in bloom — to you, my heart: to you, beloved.
Written by Travis Helms
APRIL 2025 -
Open Your Eyes
Turning, I’m blinded by the sun
Knowing it was there
But turning, eyes wide, towards it anyways
I guess I needed the shock
The momentary pain
Before I could conclude
That the sun was in fact shining
I go days without the sun on my skin
Let alone in my eyes
But I know that’s not entirely true
The sun is there but I am not
I am lost in thought, in word, self absorbed
Unwilling to see the light
Only when I turn into it, unblinking
So sure it doesn’t exist
Am I put in my place.Written by Raena Parsons
MARCH 2025 -
Twilight Sleep
In bed, waiting for sleep to touch my shoulder,
Trying to quiet thoughts running amok,
Restless, dodging an out of control boulder,
In order to avoid being struck.How long before peace stills my soul,
How long before I start to dream,
How long before I give up control,
How long until the slow moving stream?Where I skip upon puffy white clouds,
Leaving my burdens on the pillow,
Wondering how long before I am allowed,
To rest by the cool creek under the willow.At last, I drift off into the quiet deep,
The Circus tent closes, at last to sleep.Written by Craig Youngblood
MARCH 2025 -
The Morning Dance
Oh, an eastern sky —
Horizon balanced
In the rose-colored morning light
Marking a new day,
Welcoming the heart
To explore
To live
To smile
Upon the delicate
Pastel orange sand
And delight upon the shadows cast
As crayons and ridges
Form the landscape
Of the dance.Written by Teresa Griswold
FEBRUARY 2025 -
Lavender lips of ice blue love
Who keeps company with the stars?
On this cold not quite winter night
walk slowly on glass cobbled streets
Crips footfalls ring off narrow walls.There is a sermon someplace.
Cover of silence suffocate
those free wheeling birds
darkening the sky at day’s end.
No one willing to read the fine print
will fence out the deer
while wolves slither in.All the loud noises
scream for attention.
It occurs to me to be afraid.I search the graffitied box cards
for meaning, like a lost recipe.Written by Jocelyn Slack
FEBRUARY 2025 -
Sagebrush Nocturne
Shadows under sage, indanthrene and violet.
Moon frosts the hackles of a moose,
a band of grazing elk, a wolf whose breath
|drifts on still air in a mist made of starlight.Gone are the shades of sundown, blushed
and honeyed as a ripe peach. Pricks of light
ignite the eyes of hare and falcon,
stare of coyote, silent owl.Night drains into dawnglow. Sage surrenders night hues of blue and silver
as it reaches for first light.
Wolf fades into foliage.Written by Susan Marsh
JANUARY 2025 -
Raiment
Nature arrays herself to celebrate the
Solstice. Naked cottonwoods adorn
themselves down to the thinnest twig
with glittering hoarfrost, their slim
tracery now plump against the pale,
morning sky. Their fullness shimmers in
the slanting sun. Thick junipers
frost the tips of their tresses, silver
highlights shape-shifting them from
scraggly, green-haired hags to seductive
sirens of the hillside, like silver singles
on a mature dating site. This frigid
richness seduces me into joyous
laughter, happy I ventured into the
breaking day, my breath a cloud
that freezes white upon the foliage
of my face.Written by Stephen Lottridge
JANUARY 2025
The Poem Archive
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I walk the upstream line of water stain,
tattooed on rock, in the empty wash.
The stream bed widens, opens its mouth to speak, knowing someone's here who listens.
A whispered song where river once flowedsplashing notes on banks of larkspur blooms.
If I follow this line long enough will I reach its Source?
NOVEMBER 2024 -
The coffee has been leavened.
Milk and cream to lighten
dark Columbian brown
in a way, that is not mine.
But some cups are
particularly
bitter black and belie.
the usual way
we walk down
worn tracks, one foot
almost on top of the other.
OCTOBER 2024 -
A lone coyote
Sojourns across the
Pristine snow, drifting
Like grains of sand
Rippling water,
Making steady headway
Toward a narrow creek
As a wolf song
Echoes across the valley.
Enduring howls
Ricocheting
Through pine-covered hills
Followed by a long silence-
Reveals
A single wolf.
OCTOBER 2024 -
“Not now'' hits me. like a gong
with every see-through window I run into,
every voice that doesn't sound right,
inside and out.
Yet, I hold onto "keep going" momentum,
captured by the power of infinite “right now" choruses ...
echoes in my head of “You give up your right if you don't meet this
deadline",
pressing me against terms like a bug in a book,
with guts spilling out silent screams.
“I have given up my life, not just my right",
to this pumping, pushing force that says "right now".
I am trapped by its siren calls,
with no reverse wind to pull me back.
In the life of splat,
when will “not now" ever be enough.
SEPTEMBER 2024 -
I wait patiently for that perfect instance,
That nano second, when time stands still,
Capturing a frame by stubborn persistence,
Sometimes the process, a battle of will.
Maybe a humming bird with buzzing wings,
Or graceful landing of a flamboyant drake,
A honeybee on a sweet nectar fling,
Or mountains mirrored on a placid lake.
A fox leaps in the air, after her prey,
Stranded in space, awaiting the applause,
Swallows dart about, in an acrobatic ballet,
A bear with a trout dangling from it's jaws.
Through my lens, a moment comes to life,
Forever captured, in color or black and white.
SEPTEMBER 2024
-
The house lights dim
behind the horizon
and I take my seat
in the mezzanine folding chair.
The nightly show:
Cicadas
and Spring Peepers and
the soft breeze that plays
Magnolia leaves.
AUGUST 2024 -
Last week I sat at your shore
And thought you had drowned
The trees on your banks
I was saddened to think
Your waters would carry such sorrow
But today, I realized I was mistaken
And those branches I lamented
Have grown to trees with your recession
New leaflets adorn their outstretched arms
Announcing 'I have survived'
Even those trees whose entirety
Was submerged just last week
Have tiny buds of life
Reaching upwards to the sun
Tenacious and strong
AUGUST 2024 -
You are free to flow.
To follow the land's body as it flattens and slows, to splash as you dive over slopes of ground.
Your seasons form cut-banks and sandbars where trees lie skinned to the bone,
victims of the run-off Spring.
My mind, knows this back and forth, ebb and flow, and too has found eddies
where water stills in a holding place.
Where meadows of rose scent each breath
and colonies of nymphs wait on river stones,
to be born into flight.
JULY 2024 -
A flash of red yellow black
crosses my window. Gladness
lightens my heart where gloom
had reigned, this tanager the poem
I could not write.
JULY 2024 -
Right now it seems,
blinded by a fear
introduced by suggestion,
the masses of people
inhabiting life
are running in circles
wearing a blindfold
obscuring their vision of calmness. They are spinning
in a vast circle of insanity unaware of a reality
taking place beyond the boundaries of this crazed halo
of hysteric delirium.
JUNE/JULY 2024 -
Have you ever stared at a barren tree in the winter
and wondered if it would ever bloom again?
I have. May I send note on sparrow wings to
Tell you of this coming spring?
I have seen it before. The blossoms.
I have seen the buds poke out and I wish.
I wish them into existence. I wish them to be beautiful. Like you. I see them and send love on fairy dust to them. To grow and be happy and strong and everlasting.
Now. Can I ask for the same. For this tree to become anew. And have others send prayers on the wind my way?
MAY/JUNE 2024 -
Snowflakes and flurries fall in patterns of wind forming crystals on powder banks.
Diamond dust glitters in sun-lit skies.
And hoar frost decorates willows by river beds.
Sleet and slop is the wetness of snow.
As moisture and wind sing together in a duet of changing form as temperatures rise and fall.
I name it adagio snow, as it slowly falls.
Hold a single flake that melts on my palm.
Each moist kiss of snow on my face, a reflection of the One, in many names, many forms
MARCH 2024 -
Seemingly calm and serene
In a warm summer breeze
A field of lush lavender
Twas always the cure
Wildflowers don’t heal the pangs
Feel the bite of her wolfs fangs
FEBRUARY 2024 -
Your subble is seared into my right cheekbone, sweat sparkling on raw skin; you are mostly careful not to
hurt me and I mostly say I do not want to be hurt, and still:
I turn each drop of pain over and over in my palm
a fistful of fierce animal beauty
FEBRUARY 2024 -
As far back as I can remember,
In her presence I felt unsafe.
I was at a loss as to how to be right.
How I spoke, how I acted, how I looked ...
In her eyes, all of me was wrong.
She accused me of hiding the inedible overcooked peas. She dismissed me; labeled me a liar.
I was five.
I asked her if she'd ever lied to me.
"No." She said.
I knew it was a lie.
JANUARY 2024