Patricia L. Goodman
BLUE
Eviscerated, it lay in my path, head
missing, entrails littering the walk, splendid
blue-jay feathers scattered,
fair-game victim of a hungry hawk.
On TV, videos of massacre victims in Syria,
Afghanistan. Unidentified,
bulldozed into mass graves as if never
loved or missed,
they vanish.
With tenderness I lifted
the bird’s remains, gathered feathers,
carried them
to a small stream sheltered
by mulberry trees and wild cherries,
laid them
where no bulldozer can reach.
Author’s Comment: “Blue” is a true narrative. I am immensely moved by birds, and by the human cruelty in the world, although I don’t equate a hawk’s securing a meal to our insensitivity to each other. I was more concerned that the bird be given proper, natural respect.
Bio: Patricia L. Goodman is a widowed mother and grandmother and a graduate of Wells College with a degree in Biology and membership in Phi Beta Kappa. She spent her career raising, training and showing horses with her orthodontist husband, on their farm in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. She now lives in northern Delaware, where she enjoys writing, singing, birding, gardening and spending time with her family. Many of her poems have been published in both print and online journals and anthologies and she was the 2013 and 2014 winner of Delaware Press Association’s Communications Contest in poetry. Her first full-length book of poetry, Closer to the Ground, was a finalist in the Dogfish Head Poetry Contest, and was published in August, 2014 by Main Street Rag Publishing Company. In 2015 she received her first Pushcart nomination. Much of her inspiration comes from the natural world she loves.
Wild Goose Poetry Review 