Welcome to Sunday Poetry.  If this is your first visit you can read about the purpose and inspiration of my Sunday blogs here.

I loved today’s poem the moment it found me.  Maybe I love it most because we rejoined Netflix this month after a summer away, and in the past two weeks I’ve seen more movies than I’d seen the entire spring and summer.  Movies, by Billy Collins, is a tongue-in-cheek look at the joys of the cinema, and our yearnings to experience life on the safety of the big screen.  I love the imagery here.  Can you imagine Collins “with the bed hitched up to the television, they way they’d hitch up a stagecoach?”   Every time I read that, I smile.

Where do you feel safe?  Who would you like to be in an old Western?  The bartender or the station master?  How about the hoochie-mama in can-can gear at the local saloon? The prim schoolmistress who yearns for the sheriff?  The sidekick who makes everybody laugh?  The faithful dog who trots out of town at the heels of the palomino stallion?  With which character would you feel safe?  Which one would allow you to take the “short cut home?”

Remember there are no quizzes here, no right ways to read or contemplate the poem we share.  Just come along for the “read,” and enjoy the experience.    What line, word or thought will you carry along with you this week?  And if you’d like to tell us where the poem took you?  We’ll listen.