Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.

I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Monday, January 13th, 2025.

Today's poems, plural, come from poet laureate Ted Couser's book, The Blizzard Voices.

This is a collection of poems written by Coosier based on firsthand accounts and reminiscences of the Great Storm of 1888, also known as the

schoolchildren's blizzard that swept down out of the north and froze

much of Nebraska and surrounding regions, burying them in feet of snow in just a few hours,

so rapidly that many teachers and schoolchildren were trapped in their schoolhouses. In fact,

as Coozer notes in the introduction to his book, there is in the Nebraska State Capitol a memorial

to one of those school teachers, Minnie Mae Freeman, who led her students to safety, trailing hand in hand through the blinding snow.

Each poem is labeled as simply a man's voice or a woman's voice.

It become this collection of anonymous memories, all speaking together to weave an image of this great and traumatic storm,

this great blizzard of 1888.

I'll read just three today, but I highly recommend you lay your hands upon the entire collection.

Here are some of Ted Couser's blizzard voices.

A man's voice.

One man who was lost that day had been shelling corn and had gone to a neighbor's to borrow a grain scoop.

Halfway home he was caught by the storm, and he left the scoop in the snow near the road.

He wandered ahead of the wind and was found that spring when it thawed,

12 miles southeast of his home.

A woman's voice.

My maiden name was Hannah, and I was 12 at the time.

We had been playing fox and geese in the schoolyard during the afternoon recess when the blizzard bore down out of the northwest, roaring and

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