Recalling the power of poetry to connect strangers across the country

Two poets were waiting for me when we pulled into a gas station somewhere on the Texas Panhandle.

My husband and I were moving back to California after spending the first year of our marriage in Washington, D.C., where he worked for the Interior Department and I had started a poetry magazine. 

When I mentioned in an editor’s note about our road trip to the West Coast, several of the poets I published asked if we would be passing through their town. If so, they wanted to meet up.