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This site exists for one purpose only: to help dispel the ugly and absolutely untrue myth that poetry is boring. Granted, a lot of poetry is boring, but you won't find it here. At Your Daily Poem, you'll find poetry that is touching, funny, provocative, inspiring, uplifting, and surprising. It may punch you in the gut, it may bring tears to your eyes, it may make you laugh out loud, but it most assuredly will not bore you!
Poetry on YDP—by poets living and long dead, famous to completely unknown--is specially selected for accessibility and appeal. Thanks so much for visiting—and remember: a poem a day keeps the doldrums away!
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Locust Hill
by
Elizabeth Drewry Lizzie B. Davis is buried next to the road.
Driving past at 55, I turn my head in time to see
her stone name and wonder What's the B for.
She liked to know what was going on.
High on her father's shoulders, she tugged
his hair and kicked her small feet into his collar bones
to make him turn around and around.
Lizzie climbed a chestnut oak to spy
on the red-haired twins, deciding which one to marry;
chose the younger by three minutes for the way
he looked at her without dipping his head.
They built a flat-roofed house. No upstairs room to gaze from
but a porch she could sweep with an eye to the lane
and an eye to the field for her husband and sons—
the eldest freckled and big-boned like his father, and three more
dark and quick, stair-stepping into hand-me-downs. Her girl
was stillborn, the one time Lizzie turned her face to the wall.
It's dusk, and I switch on my headlights, catch the eyes
of a raccoon lumbering along the ditch.
The B stands for a name not bequeathed.
Walking tomorrow in that family plot, I'll trace a line
from stone to stone, touch the stark dates that shuttered
Lizzie from the long view she loved beyond and beyond.
This poem first appeared in Still Home: The Essential Poetry of Spartanburg (Hub City Writers Project, 2008).
Used here with the author's permission.
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Elizabeth Drewry is a Shakespeare enthusiast, a yoga practitioner, and a half-hearted cook except for her specialty, peach pies. She's a charter member of the National Blues Foundation headquartered in her hometown of Memphis, Tennessee. Now retired, she was a newspaper executive for twenty-five years in New York and California. She lives in the beautiful foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, where she writes poetry and is working toward her first collection.
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EstherJ:
This poem is like a glimpse into someone else's life, true or fictional. It makes me think about perspective, pulling back and looking at myself, and others, from a different angle.
Posted 03/15/2026 09:24 AM
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Ginny C.:
Nicely done.
Posted 03/15/2011 04:21 PM
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twogforce@yahoo.com:
She's fabulous. I've always loved Lizzie B. Davis.
Posted 03/15/2011 09:19 AM
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Buckner14:
Great use of imagination! And Jayne, I love your intros to the poems...such as this one.
Posted 03/15/2011 09:01 AM
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Carol Hauer:
A made-up story is just as good as a true story...if it's told right. Yours is.
Posted 03/15/2011 08:52 AM
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dotief@comcast.net:
This is so powerful and poignant! I love how it meanders through a life and then brings us to its end where we are asked to somehow understand Lizzie's sorrow. Very good poem!
Posted 03/15/2011 08:46 AM
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