Rose Novick: Two Poems
Haibun
Here I am, squawking rudely over birdsong, though it seems no
one but me is bothered. Why not? I don’t know. Maybe you’re
hoping secret revelations wait coiled within my caws, and crackled
rudeness is the grate through which they’re leaking. I prefer to
think along soberer lines. Nature is secretless. To think a wrong
thought is impossible. For instance: overhead, the geese are in their
standard V-formation: death-dread reigns here as everywhere. No
esoterics, just the clever machinations of a being rudely thrust into
existence and, somehow, attached to this eternal incompatibility
with earthly bliss.
Or take this fragment of a robin on the sidewalk, less today than
yesterday, the ever-fading pride of flies (don’t say you have not
noticed how we take credit for deeds we do not own.