Ben Brooks

This lot has no place

a memory beautiful in youth and bleary-eyed
from the longest of guided night treks we offered.
In darkness, the campers  parlayed with cows and
meditated, cross legged with mountain chorus frogs,

slowly hiking the star-salted ridge, mostly bald
from years of grazing. pre-dawn, we descended
into a quiet valley, divers buoyed in crepuscular blue.
we find lush pastures bordered by cold streams,

divided by relaxed brown wire with sharp man made thorns.
two desiccated husks of tan lizards impaled on these.
a flurry of pointed fingers, a soprano voice cried,
“the handiwork of a songbird, it's the loggerhead shrike.”

sadism as part of its charm, I see a songbird villain:
cowboy boots over spindly legs, a hooked beak,
dark eyes under a Stetson with a band of silver medallions.
he leaves his cruel signature on cacti and barbwire.

they are not as common now, as they were then,
i think that i might blame gentrification.
this lot has no place with a sharp stiletto
in one hand, macchiato in the other.

i am lucky to remember this curious creature.
easily identified, at least by its brutal ways.
a memory from an early mystical journey
with as many years now, as I am likely yet to log.

you are what you eat

we superstitious creatures imagine
that we gain the power of a being
from the killing and the eating of it.
as one might say, you are what you eat.

you could eat the heart of a lion for its strength
or your vanquished enemy for guile and cunning.
the natural strength and nobility of the hart
is consumed in subsistence or simply in sport.

the killing seems to be enough,
as a rich man’s safari would show.
they own these beautiful, free beings
and their attributes so fully.

we accept this implicitly.
I ask you this my dear reader,
must all the attributes be good?
what about those not desired?

do you acquire the lion’s laziness,
maybe the bad breath of your enemy,
or perhaps you might see without color,
taking the vision of the noble hart?

consider the Allegheny woodrat.
losing its place in our rural county.
once eaten and now exterminated
for trespassing on our territory.

as we erase this creature, do we take
the eccentricity of this pack rat,
lining its nest till narrow trails remain;
its habit of hoarding this, that, the shiny?

garages, basements and attics are stuffed,
until floors sag and walls bow, and then break,
exploding storage spaces far across
the landscape.

Ben Brooks is a full-time dreamer and explorer. Poetry is there when [he] need[s] it. Thank you, poetry.

Tile: Robert Havell after John James Audubon, Loggerhead Shrike, 1829, Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington