top of page

Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem.-Edgar Allan Poe

Poetry is when emotion has found its thought and thought has found words--Robert Frost

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance--Carl Sandburg

I have nothing to say, I am saying it, and that is poetry--John Cage

You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you--Joseph Joubert

Poetry is what in a poem makes you laugh, cry, prickle, be silent, makes your toe nails twinkle, makes you want to do this or that or nothing, makes you know that you are alone in the unknown world, that your bliss and suffering is forever shared and forever all your own. ~Dylan Thomas

joybragi84
Mar 25, 20232 min read

Some Ol' Timey Axentyouation


Prickly green gumballs! If you think it is hard to get a picture of one crow sitting anywhere, try getting three of them to sit still for the time it takes to touch a circle on your cellphone. Nearly every day on our walks at the fairgrounds/city park, Kellie, Luna, and I encounter three crows that I have named the Crow Brothers. They are ever present, and they were "a messing' around" this morning as Luna and I walked in the bracing wind, but I never could get even one of them in a picture. So, I hunted up this picture that I took last summer. Of course, it is only one of them, but I think that you can see the shadows of the other two mixed in with the shadows of the tree limbs.


Anyhow, I have named them the Crow Brothers though they could be sisters or brothers and sisters or a love triangle. Who knows? I didn't get a picture this morning, but when I saw them, I thought that I needed to write a poem about them. For some reason or another, I could only hear a poem about the crows in my head told in the voice of an old mountain woman. You know the kind I'm thinking about, stringy long hair, big crooked nose, corn cob pipe in her toothless mouth. No! No! I am kidding. In my mind, I hear some mash up of Mrs. Bertha Strayer, Mrs. Retha Hastings, and Mrs. Araloise Wilson, three gentle ladies from around Sunnyland, AR that I loved to listen to--and they sure did love to talk and to feed a feller if he would eat.


Anyhow, I have never been a fan of attempting to display local dialect in literature--even with as great a writer as Mark Twain--, but this is the way I heard the poem in my head. Let me know what you think. As always, ENJOY!


Three Crow Brothers


Theys allus three crow brothers

A messin’ on Fern hill

Theys a flittin’ and a dippin’

But theys never standin’ still—

Twos a scratchin’, ones a watchin’

With a piercin’ evil eye,

Till a hackin’ and a cawin’,

They explode into the sky.

A hecklin’ and a jawin,’

They cut shines all through the blue.

I allus wondered who theys funnin’ at.

I think it must be you.

Comments

I find that I cannot exist without Poetry--without eternal poetry--half the day will not do--the whole of it--I began with a little, but habit has made me a Leviathan.-John Keats

We do not quite say that the new is more valuable because it fits in; but its fitting in is a test of its value.-T. S. Eliot

A man may praise and praise, but no one recollects but that which pleases.-George Gordon, Lord Byron

The great beauty of poetry is that it makes everything in every place interesting.-John Keats

Our faulty elder poets sacrificed the passion and passionate flow of poetry to the subtleties of intellect and to the stars of wit; the moderns to the glare and glitter of a perpetual, yet broken and heterogeneous imagery, or rather to an amphibious something, made up, half of image, and half of abstract meaning. The one sacrificed the heart to the head; the other both heart and head to point and drapery.-S. T. Coleridge

The purpose of rhythm, it has always seemed to me, is to prolong the moment of contemplation, the moment when we are both asleep and awake, which is the one moment of creation.-W. B. Yeats

bottom of page