Forgive me
 for backing over
 and smashing
 your red wheelbarrow.

 It was raining
 and the rear wiper
 does not work on
 my new plum-colored SUV.

 I am also sorry
 about the white
 chickens.

I was leafing through one of Billy Collins’s anthologies of contemporary American poetry (“180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day”) when I ran into this. I love the haiku-like simplicity of the lines, and the random irreverent touches (“plum-colored SUV”, “white chickens”). So spare, not a word out of place, and one gets such a clear and vivid picture of the event when reading it.

“An Apology” was a finalist for the 2003 James Hearst Poetry Prize and appeared in The North American Review Vol. 288, No. 2.

Frances Jean Bergmann is a web designer and artist. She reads at spoken word venues, and has been published in Margie-The American Journal of Poetry, Wind, Pavement Saw, Realpoetik,in the anthology Connected: Poetry Online In The Age Of Computers, in her own chapbooks, and has a poem included in 180 More (Random House 2005). In 2003 she received the Mary Roberts Rinehart National Poetry Award; in 2004 she won the Pauline Ellis Prose Poetry Prize with “Wall.” She lives in Madison, Wisconsin (USA), and maintains several local poetry websites.

Biographical information from:
http://www.madpoetry.org/madpoets/bergmann.html
http://www.wfop.org/poets/bergmann.html
http://www.fibitz.com/biostate.html

-param

PS. Here’s the original:
Poem #83