Leave your feedback Share Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/poetry-childs-room-in-autumn Email Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Tumblr Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Transcript Robert Pinsky, former poet laureate, reads a poem for the season. Read the Full Transcript Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors. ROBERT PINSKY: Here, for this season of school and football–and also of terror–is Rosanna Warren's poem, "Child's Room in Autumn:"The scene is about order, the maple tree a conflagration trapped in the rectangle of window, the Newton High football players outside an explosion surging freeof the grip of game and field. And the sky is gray cotton batting pressing down over us, wadded by skilledhands between branches and rooflines. October wants to ignite. In Benjamin's room, a set of toy soldiers shinesalong the shelf, jumble of prancing eras armed with bazookas, crossbows, spears. Tacked to the wall,a Map of Planet Earth's Disaster Areas shows garlands of volcanoes spilling cherries outto sea, buttercups for earthquakes, a lime-green swarm of bees the tornado alarm: toy translations of warsprinkled across the map as though catastrophe were a board game you could win. The room holds peace in a trapof representations. Ben's at school, the house clenches its calm, the Times softly delivers its daily harm in grisaille blur, but geometrical:pyramid-hunched, a mother grieves over small bodies arranged in a row; elsewhere, a darkhaired boy stands alone as the last jeep leavesunder a charred, rectangular swatch of sky. The scenes are about suffering, how it lurches out of any picture, giving the lieto pity, to composition. I sweep Benjy's room, waiting for him to come home, happy with stories: he'll runout into the autumn field where, now, cheers erupt, helmets are tossed high, and leaves swim down in wildshoals, gold pennants, streamers loosened to glorify the field, the ephemeral victors, leaving the boughs to the sky.