A Few Poems from HYMNODY OF THE BLUE HERON, by Kevin HadduckAlleluias of the Red Tail Drive, fleck-breasted bullet, down. Plummet, plunge, pierce-eyed plume. Test the aim of talons, bow-string taut. Lay siege my word-lack, lackluster Language, razor-wing; rend wide The curtain-sky, slice cloud-veils. Pounce, grasp mouse and mole, rapt, Fear-stunned, mumbling close among Furrowed wheat and fallow. Rise, raise Me, mouse, groundling, in your gullet, Dying at your every word-wing beat. In fire-hunger, aery alchemist, consume. In the heat of heart-blood, I, convert, Will become body, embodied, bidden Voice, your throat’s cry, here to hail, Call, declare you, your dominion, Draw into chorusing your choirs, Singing winging your alleluias. Bellowing Ark. March/April, 2003, p.9. A Note to His Doctor
My friend, old and passing, said, “There is more to life than staying alive. Don’t rescue me too much.” On his farm, twelve miles out by rough gravel roads, he is done with plowing, spraying, harvesting. But he is not done watching the sun sink below the windbreak or listening to the nighthawks above his fields. Don’t make him move to town. There is more to tragedy than dying. Journal of the American Medical Association. Vol 312, Nu 1, p. 98 July 2, 2014. Waving Man, 5th Street and I-35, Waco Every new day we saw him, old seer of our sunrise, minister of morning. Flailing oracle, thundering his orations, the waving man still dances frantic, wild between relentless traffic lanes, flinging down his weird word-hoard against the frenetic monotone of wheels. Lone denizen of a diminished Eden, he presses along the margins of highway, homeless in his squeezed field of grass littered with flung bottles and bags-- This Adam attenuate at sunrise rises, dew-covered, and pumps his arm, his outstretched palm welcoming, conferring his bounty of blessings, or his solitary finger signaling an edict of disgust-become-indifference, or his fire-and-sulfur fist pounding the proclamations of God against our startled faces. Lunatic jester, exile of mental ward, come sing your fierce-weird songs into my waking dreams; awaken me, or I may die in my walking sleep. Oh desperate man blacker than coffee and pungent with the sweat of zeal, holler and howl to me my matins. Punch and puff and guffaw through the near absolute white noise of the world. Journal of the American Medical Association. Vol 312, Nu 2, p. 193, July 9, 2014. |