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Introduction by Ted Kooser: Several years ago I published a children’s book about a bag in the wind, so it’s no wonder I love this poem by April Lindner, who lives in Pennsylvania. Once you start noticing these windblown bags, you see them everywhere. Her most recent book is This Bed Our Bodies Shaped (Able Muse Press, 2012).

Carried Away

One rainy night we sat in traffic

and, overtired in back, you saw

a wind-whipped grocery bag afloat

beyond the clutch of jagged branches,

swept by gusts and whirled in eddies.

A sudden downdraft swooped it earthward,

where it danced till with a whoosh

a current luffed it past the power lines.

Disowned by gravity, small ghost

not yet snagged by twiggy fingers,

it couldn’t reach the earth. Thin-skinned,

it pulsed, translucent jellyfish.

You wept and pled to be let out

into the dark and slanted rain,

somehow to save that desolate thing.

The light turned green and still you begged,

Go back, go back, on its behalf,

caught and held, bossed and tossed

by a will much greater than its own.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2010 by April Lindner, “Carried Away,” (The Hudson Review, Vol. LXIII, no. 1, Spring 2010). Poem reprinted by permission of April Lindner and the publisher. Introduction copyright ©2015 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.