Jeanine Walker

Countryside

The grass growing green as a bottle,
the transparent plastic roofs of nurseries,
newer buildings erected for vacation,
bales of hay. Small old houses sturdy still,
the persistent rust of an old train.
Terraced crops. And the sense that one
could have chosen to not come here
at all, to not be a witness to this
ordinary splendor. To have missed
a chance means finding another kind
of chance, but still—the farmers
bending forward in their wet fields, the song
of the magpie calling out for home.

Jeanine Walker is the author of The Two of Them Might Outlast Me (Groundhog Poetry Press, 2022) and has been recognized with a 2025 microgrant for Korean poetry translation from Seattle City of Literature. Her poems and translations have found homes in Poetry, Denver Quarterly, Pleiades, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. Jeanine teaches poetry and publishing in Seattle.