Wednesday, September 19, 2012
Ben, by the way (a guest poem for the Menagerie)
Ben, by the way, when
one of our parakeets
died last week, was the first to say
when freer days were
over, and the summer,
alas, had ended coolly,
when I didn’t have
time for such a poem
as this on the Lost Menagerie,
as we lowered
the birdcage from our Russian
rafters, Ben was the one to pray.
He prayed, especially
when I dug the lifeless
bird into the autumn earth,
not quite a
see-you-later prayer, more
than an hasta-manana blessing,
days before the
pet store’s replica would
join its brothers in the chapel cage
Ben prayed with
a grateful appreciation,
saying “thank you for your worth.”
And now the other
parakeet, placed beside
those who would live another day
and lifted with them
to hang from the rafters rising
over one who had died
is placid, quiet
as a gravedigger, or
confused, with no words to offer,
and it was for this
parakeet, too, by the way,
that Ben was the first to pray.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Art is revisitable, and revisiting Thirty Birds has been one of the highlights of this busy and fitful week. A larger highlight is reading and re-reading and re-reading this poem: in solitude, in solitude again, thinking about Manya #1 who died, Manya #2 who in the same Packer colors replaced her, thinking about Zazu who in Denver Nugget colors remains the one also prayed for, reading this to Ben, listening to Ben read and delight in the "by the way" attached to his name (Grandpa Dick enjoys Ben's "yeah, but.." conjunctions, a synonym perhaps for "by the way").
ReplyDeleteThank you for this poem--it will proudly hang atop lostmenagerie.blogspot.com for all to appreciate, and some day, following brother's lead (and maybe latching into Simorgh Press?) we'll see another great book to order for our shelves.
By the way, not for the first time, this modest comment box and, like Hamlet's nutshell that he could be bounded in ("and consider [him]self a king of infinite space"), is far and above the hopes I had and still have for our humble symposia. I don't often sign off with my alma matter's reminder for our sundry endeavors, so it is a special feeling to extend:
Soli Deo Gloria