Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read “Hope on the Line” by Katherine Koller.

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Hope on the Line

By Katherine Koller

Hardwired for it

we know

yellowed leaves fall

dying eyes close

books burn to ash

fireworks explode

but hope

antennaes another leaf

anticipates one more day

fingers the next page

beholds the

wings of a bird.

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Copyright © Katherine Koller

Previously published in Happiness Reflected: A Community Poetry Project, 2023.

Katherine Koller writes for stage, screen and page. Her books are Voices of the Land (plays), Art Lessons (novel), a Finalist for the Edmonton Book Prize and the Alberta Readers’ Choice Award, and Winning Chance (stories), which won a High Plains Book Award. Short fiction has appeared in Grain, Room, Epiphany, Alberta Views, Very Much Alive, Polish[ed], LitSphere, Prairie Journal, EDify, and Through the Portal; creative nonfiction in Prairie Journal, The Pandemic and Me, WestWord and upcoming in Please Don’t Interrupt; and poetry in Prairie Journal, NorthWord, Happiness Reflected, and online at Poetry Pause. Katherine is a founding producer of Edmonton Script Salon, a monthly new play reading series, and a returning member of the Citadel Theatre Playwrights’ Lab, where she is working on an adaptation of a Jane Austen’s Persuasion.

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