Thursday, April 26, 2012

PAD Challenge Day 26

Today is "Poem in Your Pocket Day", and my online friend and haiku poet extraordinaire Cara Holman has a special blog post today featuring a variety of poems, including my Fibonacci poem "Big Picture".  Check it out here.

Today's prompts from Poetic Asides and NaPoWriMo: (1) Write an animal poem, and (2) write an elegy.  I'm glad to have a relatively easy challenge after some tough ones the last couple of days, but I recently wrote a poem called "Elegy for Two Finches", which came in second a few months ago in Robert Brewer's  Tritina Challenge on the Poetic Asides blog.  So it took a little while to come up with another idea in that vein, but here it is:


Elegy for Roadkill

To the several squirrels
I’ve seen in the street this spring
not quite quick enough
to dodge deadly tires;

to the Canada goose
near the shopping mall
a riot of black and gray feathers;

to the large mammal I couldn’t identify
on the center line of the highway,
brown fur matted by the rain,
the size of a dog, but not a dog
(perhaps a groundhog or beaver –
I couldn’t see your face)
lying on your side as though sleeping;

to the poor box turtle
who never stood a chance,
shell smashed like an oversized walnut:

I am sorry for my small part in this –
I drive the roads you cross,
I’ve sped as quickly as your killers,
and, God help me, in my lifetime
I’ve taken out a few of you myself.






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