BLUE HERON POETRY
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A Few Poems from HYMNODY OF THE BLUE HERON, by Kevin Hadduck


Alleluias 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.






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  • Home
  • About
  • Featured Poems
  • Books
    • A Farewell to Lent
    • Hymnody of the Blue Heron
    • When Words Get in the Way