Birds and Beasts; or, A Response to a Review of the Best American Poetry Series in which the Critic argues that “American Poets Have Taken a Hands-Off Approach to Every Disturbing Reality, Retreating into Their Academic Shells to Produce a Poetry that is Uniformly Escapist.”
Man is not much beside the birds and beasts.
— Hemingway
Should I write about the eight-inch crayfish
we saw this morning
crawling across the road between
two cornfields here in Middle Indiana
in the middle of the winter, its oversized claws
opening and closing to ward us off
while more than 35 million people
in the United States alone
went hungry this year?
How could I not?
Or the turkey vultures
that swooped down around us
and up to perch on a bare branch
of a Sycamore.
Never again, we said
about the Holocaust;
what about Rwanda, Darfur?
The dog was going crazy. She didn’t know
whether to snatch one out of the air
or make for it on the run.
Or the dry shell of a cicada
my daughter put in a clear container
with a leaf and a bottle cap of water.
Her entire life has been lived
in war time. What will I tell her
when she asks how in God’s name
we let it happen?
“It’s having a baby!” she woke me to tell me,
as a maggot crawled out of its body.
Or the fish
left in the mud
after the flooded river receded,
barely alive, but alive, its mouth
closing and opening
as Cyclone Nargis devastates Myanmar
and 130,000 people are dead or missing
and the junta denies aid from any foreign country.
She decided to save it by picking it up by the tail
and giving it back to the river.
River
A river flows silently behind our lives.
There is an undercurrent
we have been warned about.
Sometime, in the evening,
we will go to meet it,
to stand beside it, to say nothing, and will be blessed.
Sometime, when the mood is right, we will put a foot in.
Norman Minnick’s first collection of poems, To Taste the Water (Mid-List
Press, 2007), won the First Series Award. Of this collection, Robert
Bly says, "There is a rare quiet and seriousness here... [Minnick] is
always looking out, and some dark thing hovers just at the edge of the page.” Norman is editor of Between Water and Song, an anthology of younger poets,
forthcoming in 2009 from White Pine Press. His poems are forthcoming in Zone
3, Lyric, Blue Mesa Review, and the anthology And Know This Place:
Poetry of Indiana. He lives near Indianapolis and teaches Language
Arts at Fountain Square Academy.