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Some Chicken

Some chicken, Churchill said, some neck.
It seemed that Britain’s had been wrung,
and after death no chickens peck,
but Britain did, though Hitler flung
his Luftwaffe at it, to blitz
the nation which was not a chicken.
This is a simile that fits
each one of us. Though we may sicken
as we approach near-death, it’s not
our head, which time attempts to sever,
that helps us to survive, but what
some call the life-force that says “Never! ”
Like slaughtered chickens without heads
it lets us run around until,
ignoring prayers and futile meds,
we say to God: “Now do Your will.”

Inspired by a poem, “The Hen, ” by Ellen Bryant Voigt, which first appeared in Claiming Kin (1976) . Charles Simic quoted it in the NYR, December 18,2008, in a review of poems by her Ron Padgett. He cites Edward Hirsch, who correctly states: “A bleak energy of mourning permeates her work.” Simic adds: “We have become a nation of self-absorbed individuals who care little about the lives of the underprivileged, and that attitude has even affected our literature. Voigt doesn’t have trouble putting herself in other people’s shoes.

THE HEN

The neck lodged under a stick,
the stick under her foot,
she held the full white breast
with both hands, yanked up and out,
and the head was delivered of the body.
Brain stuck like a lens, the profile
fringed with red feathers.
Deposed, abstracted,
the head lay on the ground like a coin.
But the rest, released into the yard,
language and directives wrung from it,
flapped the insufficient wings
and staged forward, convulsed, instinctive––
I thought it was sobbing to see it hump the dust,
pulsing out those muddy juices,
as if something deep in the gizzard,
in the sack of soft nuggets,
drove it toward the amputated member.
Even then, watching it litter the ground
with snowy refusals, I knew it was this
that held life, gave life,
and not the head with its hard, contemplative eye.

12/6/08

poem by Gershon Hepner
Added by Poetry Lover
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