Ears & April morning
by Valerie Trueblood
[ poetry - february 07 ]
Ears
Here come the deer
with their high
picky step as if
hooves were fingertips.
Two of them
head for the river,
doe, fawn,
dawdling but alert.
Doe stops, lifts
hoof to ear.
Huge ears.
Remember Johnson's beagle?
Johnson, whose ears were long,
picked his dog up remember
by the ears and gave the order
to increase the production of napalm.
The fawn gives an extra kick
of both hind legs to catch up.
Why do they carry their heads so high
and wag those semaphores?
Anyone can see them.
Next week, hunting season.
Don't they know that?
No memory, no imagination.
No thought of a bullet.
Theirs the pathetic, casual joy
of the pure victim.
Because it comes in
from outside, the bullet, they don't
make it, don't pick
one of their big-eared kind to say
who makes it, who dies by it.
April morning
Morning will never fail us.
The palm of a clean white hand
opens in the east.
Onto the yellow buses, under red
flags dipped at crossings,
the children roll forward like peaches.
Goodbye! Goodbye!
Stillness of morning, wide open
as a nozzle on the green
fairway, past hissing, on flow.
And at the feeder,
two hummingbirds!
And far away a boy
new to school
has forgotten to open his eyes.
Yellow smoke peels back
from the hole of his house,
wafting black
moths of his drawing pad.
Oh the hummingbird
belongs only
to the Americas. No boy
anywhere else could draw it
with any confidence,
or ever know it
had carried his thin night cry
in its throat, or worn a gorget
of red as the badge
of quick, thrilled life like his.
Hummingbirds, come.
Pierce our armor.
