Tricia Knoll, 10/1/2018

Current Occupation: Poet
Former Occupation:  Public Information Officer, Portland Water Bureau, Portland, Oregon
Contact Information: Tricia Knoll now lives in Vermont after many years working for the City of Portland first at its Children's Museum and then at the Water Bureau. As she did her work of writing press releases, ad copy, reports and web-based information, she was waiting to write poetry. Now she lives in a five-acre woods in Vermont where wild turkeys roost in the trees some nights. Since retiring, four of her collections of poetry have found homes in print: Urban Wild (Finishing Line Press), Ocean's Laughter (Kelsay Books), Broadfork Farm (The Poetry Box) and How I Learned To Be White (Antrim House, 2018). Website: triciaknoll.com

#

A Dream from the Children’s Museum

Yes, our mantra was child’s play
is child’s work, and we sat knees up,
three mothers around a tiny red table
with red wood chairs that scraped
green linoleum as our weight shifted.

We were planning exhibits,
shuffling paper on the table
to plan how to entice
more children to play.
How serious we were

when a two-year-old had already
shown me what he loved at noon,
sorting rocks in my river rock pile
one by one, handing them with great
care to his father who put them back.

I was the chatty one, this is how
my daughter became a geologist,
picking up penny rocks. When I asked
the little boy in his blue cotton hat
with gold afro-curls erupting out

to come back to my yard to play
some day, he had no word for yes,
he kept on sifting stones. Among
them he found his first worm.