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From "As the Sun Finds You:"
In a time when consumerism and media keep us effectively asleep to the impact of our ways and wars on the rest of the world, how can we awaken? In Waking Before Dawn, Thomas R. Smith confronts the challenge and responsibility of moral awareness in some of the best and most varied poems he has written.
These poems bridge the personal and the political, from love poems and elegies to a suite of poems powerfully indicting the bankrupt Iraq war. On the home front, Smith witnesses the hope and suffering of ordinary lives diminished by a wounded democracy, while maintaining faith, with Walt Whitman, that "South, North, East, West, inland and seaboard, we will surely awake."
A respected poet, essayist, and editor, Thomas R. Smith's work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies in the U.S., Canada, and abroad. His poems were included in: Editor's Choice II (The Spirit That Moves Us Press), a selection of the best of the American small press, and in The Best American Poetry 1999 (Scribner). Garrison Keillor has featured his poetry on his national public radio show Writer's Almanac. He is author of four previous books of poems, Keeping the Star (New Rivers Press, 1988), Horse of Earth (Holy Cow! Press, 1994), The Dark Indigo Current (Holy Cow! Press, 2000), and Winter Hours (Red Dragony Press, 2005). His poetry criticism has appeared in the Pioneer Press, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Great River Review, Ruminator Review, and other periodicals. Thomas R. Smith teaches at The Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis. -Red Dragonfly Press
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"Thomas R. Smith is a high-spirited poetry horse riding over the hills of emotion." --Robert Bly
Thomas R. Smith says of his teaching: "Like many teachers, I teach what I myself would like to learn. Fear causes us to close and shield our hearts. Poetry can be a powerful counterforce to fear, but there is no formula for making it so. Together we explore the way, poem by poem."
 Waking Before Dawn- newest book! 2007
....more information at Red Dragonfly Press
 Winter Hours by Thomas R. Smith (Paperback 2005)
The Dark Indigo Current: Poems (Paperback- 2000)
Horse of Earth by Thomas R. Smith (Paperback - Jul 1994)
Walking Swiftly: Writings & Images on the Occasion of Robert Bly's 65th Birthday by Thomas R. Smith (Hardcover - Sep 1992)
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"HI"
Water stands inches deep on the basement floor,
and all I have is a snow shovel with a bent,
beat-up blade. I’m angry, shoveling water,
futility wrapped around me like wet
laundry from my mother’s old wringer washer.
Suddenly someone pokes me mid-back.
I turn, startled to see my father,
smiling though he’s been dead for seven years.
"Hi", he says, the only speech in the dream,
but enough to fully evoke his
boyishness, the shyness with which
a friendly eight-year-old might approach
a stranger, hoping for friendliness
in return. "Hi." It’s much larger than a two-
letter word the way he speaks it, it’s a whole
attitude toward life, it’s his literal
youthfulness—he’s about thirty, a full
generation younger than I, his son, and
wears a handsome and uncharacteristic
mustache grown in his relaxed new phase. . . .
* * *
The radio alarm set to a classical
music station arpeggios me awake . . .
The whole time I’m shaving, showering,
eating breakfast, I carry my father
inwardly, until the newscaster’s voice
crashes his fading grin, a fiery door
flung open to the other world, through
which storms of terrified souls are leaving. . . .
September 11, 2001
PEOPLE FALLING
It’s one thing to watch the explosions
on TV, the smoke flagging its black
united nations of grief, hydrangeas of
flame in horrible exfoliation,
but another to see the photographs
of the people who chose to jump
rather than suffer incineration in that
relentlessly collapsing inferno.
Thirteen seconds to drop from the upper
stories, hitting pavement not with a moist
thud of meat but the dry, almost metallic
fury of every fiber shattering . . .
During the Cuban missile crisis,
Dylan sang, Let me die in my footsteps
before I go down under the ground. That song
comes to mind as I’m glancing at a Time
Magazine photo in which, very high up
and small, a man and woman hold hands
as they plummet past the windowless, sheer
wall that can do nothing to help them,
that in fact can do nothing to prevent
its own falling, soon to follow. Lovers?
Friends? Or merely strangers brought together
by desperation in the last minutes of life?
How your leap, leaving behind everything
but the touch of another’s hand, tears
my heart open again, that was closed
by fear and anger, my heart that is torn
and held together by your hopeless clasp.
PEACE VIGIL
In the park our circle of lights grew,
passersby drawn to its silence in the deepening
dusk. The dark spaces between us filled in
with candle-flames cupped against the wind.
In the center we did what the government
wouldn’t, invited Peace, and she appeared.
A young man, cannon fodder age, shouted
from his truck, “Fuck you! Bomb Iraq!” Our
silence bent but didn’t break. We stood
in a place of skulls. Mostly sadness
for the poverty of it, the smallness
and “pity of war.” But anger too,
reminding us that the war is inside
everyone now, a war we must be
prepared at any moment not to fight.
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Thomas R. Smith, poet, teacher