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The Chicken Poem
Oct. 31st, 2005 11:40 pmYay for Yorke who found me the chicken poem so I can stick it in my lj info and make the title of this journal make sense:) And here, for anyone who's interested, is the inspiration behind the name Insights of a Chicken:
Passing a Truck Full of Chickens at Night on Highway Eighty
by Jane Mead
What struck me at first was their panic.
Some were pulled by the wind from moving
to the ends of the stacked cages,
some had their heads blown through the bars –
and could not get them in again.
Some hung there like that -- dead –
their own feathers blowing, clotting
in their faces. Then
I saw the one that made me slow some –
I lingered there beside her for five miles.
She had pushed her head through the space
between the bars – to get a better view.
She had the look of a dog in the back
of a pickup, that eager look of a dog
who knows she’s being taken along.
She craned her neck.
She looked around, watched me, then
strained to see over the car – strained
to see what happened beyond.
That is the chicken I want to be.
When I went to Governor's School, Lucy read that poem to us on the first night. It became a kind of identity, an inside joke of sorts over the course of the summer. To this day I consider myself to be one of the GSW 03 Chickens!
Passing a Truck Full of Chickens at Night on Highway Eighty
by Jane Mead
What struck me at first was their panic.
Some were pulled by the wind from moving
to the ends of the stacked cages,
some had their heads blown through the bars –
and could not get them in again.
Some hung there like that -- dead –
their own feathers blowing, clotting
in their faces. Then
I saw the one that made me slow some –
I lingered there beside her for five miles.
She had pushed her head through the space
between the bars – to get a better view.
She had the look of a dog in the back
of a pickup, that eager look of a dog
who knows she’s being taken along.
She craned her neck.
She looked around, watched me, then
strained to see over the car – strained
to see what happened beyond.
That is the chicken I want to be.
When I went to Governor's School, Lucy read that poem to us on the first night. It became a kind of identity, an inside joke of sorts over the course of the summer. To this day I consider myself to be one of the GSW 03 Chickens!