Dave Hedenstrom

CONTACT:
Email: davehedenstrom@gmail.com
Website: poemhome.weebly.com

BIO:
Dave Hedenstrom is a retired educator, poet, and painter, focusing once again on writing poetry. Earlier in life he had poems published in regional literary journals such as Sidewalks, North Coast Review, Rag Mag, and Wolf Head Quarterly. He recently moved to Eau Claire from St. Paul.  Among poets who have inspired him is  Alden Nowlan, who hailed from the Maritime Provinces of Canada.

Poetry

Gifts

Riding the urgent automatic freeway
one morning in March, there appeared,

up there, a gift: garland
of ragged clouds

ringing the roofed
and smoke-stacked horizon

trying on, in quick succession,
all the various shades of sunrise;

and more, to the west
one maverick cloud

of startling luminosity --
big flying billboard, courtesy Monet

advertising color -- promulgating light --
fading to white even as my eyes

lifted it out of its wind-wrapped box.

Maybe They Will Sing

There were the crayons, all sixty-four,
standing on risers in their variegated robes,
and my little hands directing this choir,
in turn letting each voice solo across pages;

and the marching band of tempera paints
bright and bold and definite,
my brush stepping out with loud broad purpose
along a clown-filled newsprint street;

and further, the plucked strings of pencils playing
alphabet symphonies, folk songs, sonatas
of solid-and-dotted-line clefs with letters
rising and falling like notes.

Even then, the world was conspiring 
against all that music. Still, here I am,
strumming and plucking on words as I can.
Maybe they will sing for you, or at least speak.