Chitra Ganesh, How to Assemble a Flying Car (detail), 2018, linocut on tan BFK Rives. Courtesy of the artist & Durham Press.
Ode to the Parrot
Prostitutes in India reputedly carried parrots.
.. .
[Parrots were] thought to be the original companions of Adam.
—100 Birds and How They Got Their Names
You are not a sudden
shadow, squeak and blood
on snow; not the rush
of wind and swoop, burst
of feathers in mid-air.
Whore’s companion
and Adam’s first bride,
parrot you are honey-
tongued lover
and the dog’s wide
yawn; you’re the mower’s
green grumble
and the cowbird’s song.
Oh you mushy-hearted
fruit-blue macaw, your
brilliant clown joy is
contagious. Give us your
butter-throated warble,
your coy bel canto
and ring-tone echo
while we madly pat
our pockets for our phones.
Meg Kearney is the author of two books of poems for adults, An Unkindness of Ravens (BOA Editions, 2001) and Home By Now (Four Way Books, 2009), winner of the 2010 PEN New England L. L. Winship Award, as well as two novels in verse for teens: The Secret of Me (National Geographic Books, 2007) and its sequel, The Girl in the Mirror (Persea, 2012). Meg’s picture book, Trouper, is forthcoming from Scholastic in fall 2013. Her poetry has appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Doubletake, AGNI, Black Warrior Review, Third Coast, Tar River Poetry, Passages North, Desperate Act, The Berkshire Review, and the anthologies Where Icarus Falls (Santa Barbara Review Publications, 1998), Urban Nature (Milkweed Press, 2000), The Book of Irish American Poetry from the Eighteenth Century to the Present (Notre Dame Press, 2006), and Conversation Pieces: Poems That Talk to Other Poems (Knopf, 2007). She lives in New Hampshire and directs the Solstice MFA Program at Pine Manor College in Massachusetts. For more information, visit her website at www.megkearney.com. (updated 6/2013)