Classic and Contemporary Poetry
THE MENAGERIE, by WALT MASON Poet's Biography First Line: All living creatures seem to throng the road Last Line: That's suffering to croak. Subject(s): Animals; Country Life; Travel; Journeys; Trips | ||||||||
ALL living creatures seem to throng the road that I would tour along, in my tin chug-mobile; they'll leave their homes and travel far, to throw themselves beneath my car, and bust a costly wheel. All thoroughfares, with mules and goats, and sheep and hens and calves and shotes, forevermore are packed; I just collided with a cowagainst her adamantine brow, my radiator cracked. The cows will leave the tender grass to block the road where I must pass, upon my road to town; the hogs will leave their sparkling swill to make a stand on yonder hill, and turn me upside down. Anon I squash a farmer's hen, that surely wasn't worth a yen, when it was in its prime; but now I hear the owner howl. "You killed my rare imported fowl, of pedigree sublime!" I jog along and break the slats of dogs and ducks and geese and cats, and always, when they die, the price goes up to beat the band; "They were the finest in the land," I hear the owners cry. The way the farmers' beasts run loose is certainly a great abuse, it is no more a joke; and if I travel west or east, at every corner there's a beast that's suffering to croak. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...RICHARD, WHAT'S THAT NOISE? by RICHARD HOWARD LOOKING FOR THE GULF MOTEL by RICHARD BLANCO RIVERS INTO SEAS by LYNDA HULL DESTINATIONS by JOSEPHINE JACOBSEN THE ONE WHO WAS DIFFERENT by RANDALL JARRELL THE CONFESSION OF ST. JIM-RALPH by DENIS JOHNSON SESTINA: TRAVEL NOTES by WELDON KEES |
|