Janice N. Harrington

Janice N. Harrington Poems

Janice N. Harrington Biography

Janice N. Harrington is an American poet and children's writer. She grew up in Alabama and Nebraska. She worked as a public librarian in Champaign, Illinois, and as a professional storyteller, appearing at the National Storytelling Festival. She now teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her work appears in African American Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Harvard Review, Indiana Review, Field, Prairie Schooner, Southern Review, and other journals.)

The Best Poem Of Janice N. Harrington

Shaking the Grass

Evening, and all my ghosts come back to me
like red banty hens to catalpa limbs
and chicken-wired hutches, clucking, clucking,
and falling, at last, into their head-under-wing sleep.

I think about the field of grass I lay in once,
between Omaha and Lincoln. It was summer, I think.
The air smelled green, and wands of windy green, a-sway,
a-sway, swayed over me. I lay on green sod
like a prairie snake letting the sun warm me.

What does a girl think about alone
in a field of grass, beneath a sky as bright
as an Easter dress, beneath a green wind?

Maybe I have not shaken the grass.
All is vanity.

Maybe I never rose from that green field.
All is vanity.

Maybe I did no more than swallow deep, deep breaths
and spill them out into story: all is vanity.

Maybe I listened to the wind sighing and shivered,
spinning, awhirl amidst the bluestem
and green lashes: O my beloved! O my beloved!

I lay in a field of grass once, and then went on.
Even the hollow my body made is gone.

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