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Showing posts with label shell. Show all posts
Showing posts with label shell. Show all posts

Thursday, April 07, 2011

Tastes of Home [Today's News Poem, April 7 2011]

Tastes of Home [Today's News Poem, April 7 2011]

Slush on the sidewalk
Snow in the doorway,
Beaks in the salad—
A seabird's attacking.

Shells were the home,
Yolk was the baby,
Whites were the mother
Hugging the offspring.

Home: where the flesh
Wraps in a blanket,
Whips to an omelet,
Stares out the window.

Springtime: a woodpecker sleeps in the branches;
White and black beak—its redness its life.
Summer: the woodchuck devours the garden—
Poison its lair and pitchfork its torso.
Autumn: the crows stand on the pikes—call them cornstalks.
Winter: the straggler is freezing,
She shatters the ice on the window
And batters stalactites—
Calling for springtime you flushed after dinner.

"Karen Cooke Phillip keeps the basement freezer of her new Anchorage house stocked with food to ward off homesickness. There is a whole king eider sea duck, including feathers and head. And she has three plastic bottles filled with seal oil: liquid gold to a Yupik Eskimo like Mrs. Cooke Phillip."
—KIM SEVERSON, The New York Times, Published: April 7, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/08/us/08alaska.html

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Thursday, May 27, 2010

Homing Chicken, Part II [Today's News Poem May 27, 2010]

Homing Chicken, Part II [Today's News Poem May 27, 2010]

Even a chick has to break its own shell.
Hatched in a classroom, the kids call them 'peeps.'
Tending the cages for birdies to dwell,
Students observe that beneath the cute cheep,
Predators lurk. When the black one falls sick,
Siblings both bury the bird in the chips—
Wood for a grave that the yellow ones kick.
Golden like sunlight that's ready to drip
Off of a cloud that evaporates soon
After that instant. The birdlings are burned.
Death by the heater that gave them the boon—
Life and then ashes: the lesson kids learned.

“Powerful governments and political expediency are helping to perpetuate torture, war crimes and other human rights abuses around the world, Amnesty International said Thursday in its annual report.”
– Mark McDonald, The New York Times, May 27, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/28/world/28amnesty.html

“The dire impact of the massive Gulf spill was apparent Sunday on oil-soaked islands where pelicans nest as several of the birds splashed in the water and preened themselves, apparently trying to clean crude from their feet and wings.
Pelican eggs were glazed with rust-colored gunk in the bird colony, with thick globs floating on top of the water. Nests sat precariously close the mess in mangrove trees.”
– GREG BLUESTEIN and MATTHEW BROWN, The Associated Press, Sunday, May 23, 2010
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gIXWYBTpLtSayJtg41LKXpxSxVPAD9FSN9GO4

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