American Life in Poetry: Column 502
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE
Many poets have attempted to describe the way in which flocks of birds fly, as if they were steered by a single consciousness. In the following poem, David Allan Evans gives us a new metaphor for the way light shows through the flying birds. Evans is Poet Laureate of South Dakota. Sixty Years Later I Notice, Inside A Flock Of Blackbirds,
the Venetian blinds
I dusted off
for my mother on
Saturday mornings,
closing, opening them
with the pull cord a few
times just to watch the outside
universe keep blinking,
as the flock suddenly
rises from November stubble,
hovers a few seconds,
closing, opening,
blinking, before it tilts,
then vanishes over a hill.
|
No comments:
Post a Comment