Artwork: "Barack Obama as A More Perfect Union," copyright by John Sokol.

This striking ink-on-Bristol drawing of Barack Obama, by Ohio native John Sokol, is made entirely out of words by Barack Obama. T-shirts with this image are available for sale. Click here for more about this portrait.

Ted Kooser chose a poem about marbles for his American Life in Poetry Column, which seems timely because I just learned, (thanks to Michael Cohill and Brian Graham, of Akron's own American Toy Marble Museum) as some other Akronites just learned for the first time, that Akron is the birthplace of the modern toy industry, and that the first toy marbles, as we know them today, were produced here in Rubber City.

–Christopher D. White

American Life in Poetry: Column 163

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

I have always enjoyed poems that celebrate the small pleasures of life. Here Max Mendelsohn, age 12, of Weston, Massachusetts, tells us of the joy he finds in playing with marbles.

Ode to Marbles

I love the sound of marbles
scattered on the worn wooden floor,
like children running away in a game of hide-and-seek.
I love the sight of white marbles,
blue marbles,
green marbles, black,
new marbles, old marbles,
iridescent marbles,
with glass-ribboned swirls,
dancing round and round.
I love the feel of marbles,
cool, smooth,
rolling freely in my palm,
like smooth-sided stars
that light up the worn world.

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 (c) 2004 by The Children's Art Foundation. Reprinted from "Stone Soup", May/June, 2004, by permission of the publisher, www.stonesoup.com. Introduction copyright (c) 2008 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.

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American Life in Poetry provides newspapers and online publications with a free weekly column featuring contemporary American poems. The sole mission of this project is to promote poetry: American Life in Poetry seeks to create a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture. There are no costs for reprinting the columns; we do require that you register your publication here and that the text of the column be reproduced without alteration.