Poets’ Corner: Thanksgiving, A Choice

Poets’ Corner: Thanksgiving, A Choice

In this Thanksgiving poem by our not-regular-enough contributor David Feela, a hawk could be a meta for us post-Thanksgiving and into the holiday season. If, that is, the day after, we see ourselves sitting high on the pole, fully satisfied and deeply grateful. If, as Michelle Obama suggested in a recent talk, we have chosen to digest only what we can control. Otherwise the choice is to be slumped over in a tryptophan haze, bowed by excess and our drunken uncle’s insistence America will be great again. If we choose to persist, in our anxiety and frustration, in tweeting the nasty stuff, we will be the barn, crushed by traffic – though, in the end, the barn does survive. 

The Shadow the Barn Casts

Early sun makes my barn

grow larger, its shadow stretching 

out to the road where traffic 

on its way to work

crashes into one side and then 

out the other. The chickens squawk

with all the commotion, 

dust and feathers rising like a storm 

against the horizon.

In an hour my barn shrinks 

back into the yard

like the shadow of a hawk

having lit on a power pole,

its appetite sated,

the whole day 

devoted to digestion.

Note: David’s poem was previously published by Ruminate.

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