Vintage Colorado Poetry Past Poet Laureate Poem of the Week March 29, 2004
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	Of Colorado poets living or dead, Thomas Hornsby Ferril is the most celebrated.  He was Yale Younger Poet of 1926, and he remained a working poet throughout his long life.  As late as 1964, in an emerging Vietnam-era world not much interested in literary regionalists, Atlantic Monthly published him.  He was Colorado's fifth poet laureate from 1979 to his death 1988.  You could easily argue that he should've been named Colorado poet laureate long before that.  For his collected poetry, see Thomas Hornsby Ferril and the American West (Fulcrum, 1996), published the centennial year of his birth. An early poem, not included there or in any of his books published during his life, "Autumn Beckons the Ice Cutter" (1922) was originally published in the Rocky Mountain News.
				Autumn Beckons the Ice Cutter At dusk the blind dog trailed him down the ridge,    Thru waves of pine and aspen tracery, To where he splashed blue spoke-paint on the bridge    One summer . . . and he leaned far out to see The lowest bench mark, and if there would be    Enough gone thru the flume to fill his pond Before the stream was down . . . and saw a tree,    Bony . . . with copper leaves, quiver beyond The moss-pinned intake of his flume . . . a frond    Of bistred bracken trembling in the play Of waxen death that held the peaks in bond ;    And what of him, should he, too, fade away, Into the yellow wind . . . fade far and dim . . .    Would some one come and cut the ice for him?                           --Thomas Hornsby Ferril Reprinted from Anthology of Newspaper Verse for 1922.