Poets and Roadkill
by David Ackley
It is indisputable that poets love roadkill,
that in poems, animals are put to painful
and implausible deaths, that the struck doe
with her fetal living fawn is pushed over the
embankment by the poet-assassin, that the quiet
hedgehog is mauled in the blades of the poet's
mower, that bears are stabbed in the gut
by the poet's swallowed bone-spear, that wolves
serrate their tongues bloody on a bloodpainted
honed knife, and bleed to death, somewhere in the
tundra not far from that agonized bear, groaning
over its gutting.
In the best, dying is neither quick nor kind,
but cannot be ignored. We are invited
to attend, while there is still time.
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Author's Note
A mashup of other poems, with a last phrase "borrowed" from Phillip Larkin's great,"The Mower." Other debts owed to Galway Kinnell, Randall Jarrell, and Donald Hall.
Other stories by David Ackley
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"In the best, death is neither quick nor kind.
We are invited to attend, while there is still time."
Words of wisdom. **
Vividly real, although as a rule I'm not fond of graphically grim expression. *
This works for me.
now the *formatting*...
;-)
Perfectly ended.*
Love the part about the poet assassin. Favorite line: "We are invited / to attend."
*
Surely it's empathy that drives these assassin poets...
Thanks, all for the kind comments, and Matt as always for the help with formatting, which still is slippery for me. Gary, I hoped the last lines steered toward that in the implicit requirement that the torment cannot be ignored, "attention must be paid."
Whoa. Powerful stuff.
(It looks like you might be spacing the lines over too far causing the last word of longer lines to wrap around. Try backspacing a bit. I know, it's a pain in the a**. I've had to redo poems as many as five times to get them to display right.)
Thanks, S. ( I am not about to respell that pseudonym.) Matt keeps after me to center the poems under the title, so there's that.
This seems from the beginning, with its pointed title, to be a poem of instruction, and it is in that pleasant way of being reminded of lines in poetry one actually knows, so in that way it is conspiratorial and even congratulatory of all of us. That is how one gets flu in the end! And I think it's great, the equivalent of poet-inventors you recognize. *
Can't get the teacher out of the boy, I guess, Ann. I take it you mean the poetry flu, which once caught is chronic, though rarely fatal. Well, maybe sometimes, arguably. Thanks for delicious comment.
Not just poets, writers, painters, filmakers etc. . . The graphic stuns. I appreciate your not pandering by making the reader comfortable. Reminds me of Hemingways's short gore in the Vinca edition of his stories.
Not all abide by what Dickinson enjoined. Lucinda, "Tell the truth but tell it slant." On the whole, I think that's a better way, but there are always exceptions in poetry,which would be nothing if not welcome to exception. Thanks for the engaged response.
In the end I want to examine the wound from where the blood springs.*