Exploring angels through the lens of poetry, from Angels of Bread to the Necessary Angel, the Better Angel, the Industrious Angel, the Child Angel, Angel on Wheels, Angel in the House, Guardian Angel, the Angels in America, Angels Who Have Returned With My Memories (from the Chicken Chronicles)—
Glorious, Rufus, Gertrude Stein, Splendor, Hortensia, Agnes of God, the Gladyses, & Babe–Hebrews 13:2 and other Bible sightings through Milton and Blake and Nancy Willard and Dickinson and Tony Kushner and Allen Ginsberg and Wallace Stevens and Miroslav Holub and George McDonald and D. H. Lawrence and Stephen Crane and Robert Service and Czeslaw Milosz, James Henry Leigh Hunt and Dylan and Tagore and Longfellow and Alice Walker and Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Whitman and Gwendolyn Brooks and Thoreau and Emerson to Martin Espada and Cocteau to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and even me, visited by angels over a train yard in Austin, Texas, your host Dr. B, Professor Barbara Mossberg for our PoetrySlowDown produced by Mr. Z, Zappa Johns, with music from hymns to the Doors to Dylan and Juice Newton and the Penguins to Michael Monroe and Judy Collins to Charlie “Bird†Parker . . . . “Are you my angel,†Ginsberg wonders about Whitman, and he is speaking for all of us, to our poets—are our poets our messengers, bringing us the news “without which men die miserably every day†(William Carlos Williams)—the news we need, the news we heed, hear hear! As we slow down, making the morning last, you angel, you, making my day . . . .
© Barbara Mossberg 2016
