Cock-A Doodle
The roosters made me do it.
Before “the cream of my brain has risen to the top” (as Virginia Woolf put it) my nest of pillows still warm, come the strangled cries. No one taught this bird the complete tune. It is “cock-a-doodle-do.”
This rooster’s cry is like shouting “Hallelu” without the “jah.” He’s short a syllable, something a poet notices. He could be hollering “Hap-py birthday, or Mer-ry Christmas!”
The Pavarotti of Bent Creek’s boasts are blatantly Biblical. “Sleepers wake!” These are cocks with a mission. If only they crowed three times. If only. If only one wasn’t answered by another, a teenaged rooster, mid-puberty.
with stupid eyes
while from their beaks there rise
the uncontrolled, traditional cries.
There are two morning heralds in my neighborhood. Two. The tenor from Hell, full of it, head back, chest high, and countertenor, preening, strutting, begging for applause –
each screaming “this is where I live!
each screaming Get up! Stop dreaming!
You don’t need to write a rooster poem. (I was thinking of a haiku…)
Elizabeth Bishop set the standard. Roosters is forty-four three line stanzas. These quotes above are hers. Read the poem intact. You’ll hear roosters in your dreams, early morning dreams, afternoon nap dreams, all day long. From verse ten and eleven of Roosters:
Deep from raw throats
a senseless order floats
all over town. A rooster gloats
over our beds
from rusty iron sheds
and fences made from old bedsteads.
I’ve got roosters on the brain. You would too if you lived here. If only they weren’t majestic… as Ms. Bishop wrote:
glass-head pins
oil-golds and copper greens,
anthracite blues, alizarus
If only they weren’t splendid. If only they weren’t vain. If only they weren’t so loud! Edward Thomas, little known modern English poet (died 1917 at age 39) had his “darkness cleaved with a silver blow.”
COCK-CROW
Out of the wood of thoughts that grows by night
To be cut down by the sharp axe of light
Out of the night, two cocks together crow,
Cleaving the darkness with a silver blow:
And bright before my eyes twin trumpeters stand,
Heralds of splendour, one at either hand.
Each facing each as in a coat of arms:
The milkers lace their boots up at the farms.
~ Edward Thomas
With apologies (sort of) to fowl lovers. Feel a need to address the chanticleer? Is a rooster rant on your “to do” list? Send me yours.
Rapid River Magazine’s 2014 Poetry Contest Winners –>