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Returning to the Ravens
For Madeleine & Joel
One April in Ketchikan, amid the politics
of Alaska and the exotica of large birds,
I found myself amused by the posturing
and strutting of ravens, the all-day-long
whimsy of their short flights, the way
they’d blacken the cedars,
then suddenly return to the streets.
Everything they did suggested mischief.
Then there were the eagles, fierce
and humorless, as the efficient often are,
up there at such a distance
their reputation could never diminish.
I felt I was watching privilege,
the advantages of birth, and would return
each day to where the ravens gathered,
happy to see their I’ve-got-a-secret smirks.
No doubt it was time to go home,
let the birds be birds, without choice.
The morning I left, raucous gulls circled
white fishing boats in the harbor.
Democrats of a catch not theirs,
they made no distinction between leftovers
and meals achieved by headlong dives
and perfect, clean entries. All appetite,
they just wanted what they wanted.
A light rain was falling, everything gray.
Among plenitude, the gulls squabbled,
the sky undulant with their trashy beauty.
-Stephen Dunn
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This issue's guest editor Alicia
Ostriker:
Alicia Suskin Ostriker has been twice nominated
for a National Book Award, she is author of numerous volumes of
poetry, most recently No Heaven as well as The Little
Space: Poems Selected and New, 1968-1998. Ostriker's poems have
appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Antaeus,
The Nation, Poetry, American Poetry Review,
Kenyon Review, The Atlantic, MS, Tikkun,
and many other journals, and have been widely anthologized.
As a critic Ostriker is the author of two pathbreaking
volumes on women's poetry, Writing Like a Woman and Stealing
the Language: The Emergence of Women's Poetry in America. She
has also published two books on the Bible, Feminist Revision
and the Bible and the controversial The Nakedness of the
Fathers; Biblical Visions and Revisions, a combination of prose
and poetry that re-imagines the Bible from the perspective of a
contemporary Jewish woman. Her most recent book is Dancing at
the Devil's Party: Essays on Poetry, Politics and the Erotic.
Ostriker has received awards from the National
Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Society of America, the San Francisco
State Poetry Center, the Judah Magnes Museum, the New Jersey Arts
Council, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation.
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