Article voiceover
One of these poems is a fantasia about a bird I’ve never seen, based on a sentence from an old book that captivated my imagination. The other poem describes something I watched as it happened and have been thinking about ever since, as if it were an augury of … well, you tell me.
THE VANISHING WHIPPOORWILL 2024 [Title and italicized lines are taken from a passage in “The Strangest Things in the World,” published in 1958 by science journalist Thomas R. Henry. During April 2024 NaPoWriMo.net invited poets to look for writing prompts in this quirky compendium, as part of their “30 poems in 30 days” challenge.] Sit out some twilight, late or early, listen as it vanishes into the life it loves, a life in night, in dapple, life as near to achieving invisibility as any living creature — not from fear, or why nest careless on shaded ground, why if wary chant and chant the dusk away then dawn back to the sky, the same quick sad cadenza, joy in a minor key, a dozen and a dozen times again? Love and enchantment dapple its life, its vanishing, no fear of humankind; whatever we may alter or destroy, it knows, at last, we cannot steal the night.
ATTACK 2025
The American flag
is under attack
by a crow who circles
the flagpole up there
on the firehouse roof.
Again and again
he hover-flaps, snatching
with talons and beak
at the wind-whipped seams
of the flag, at the clip
where it clings to the halyard.
Again and again
talons skid as he lights
on the gray steel globe
at the top of the pole.
Again and again he caws,
first Look, then Danger,
his loud voice small
in the whipping wind
and steel-gray sky.
Then he attacks
again, frantic to tear
this flapping thing out of
the air, frantic to stay
aloft himself, to attack
and keep from falling.
I love the whippoorwill poem, the details are so precise, the lack of fear of the bird chanting, nesting on the ground… And the crow and flag, what a literally metaphorical moment.
I really appreciate both of these poems which are so different and yet...
Clever, deep, perspective.