The Nobel Prize Winner

Although I try, how can I write like him,
a writer honored with the Nobel Prize?
I watch the robins light on dogwood limb
and hear the sorrow in their constant cries.
Have they descended from red-breasted birds
that looked for worms in cool of early dawn
and sang contented songs with smoothest words
when Hemingway once strolled across  this lawn?
Today, I write from break of day to dark,
not far from Ernest’s barn loft studio,
beside an oak where lightning cracked tough bark.
Goodbye, great oak.  How sad you have to go!
   If I create one sentence that is true,
   might I be worthy of the Nobel, too?

cCopyright 2006, Freeda Baker Nichols
Published in brochure of Hemingway-Pfeiffer
Creative Writers’ Retreat, 2007-2008

Pfeiffers’ House at Piggott, Arkansas
(Hemingway’s In-laws’ Home. Now a Museum)