Animal Nature

Didi Jackson’s poem “Wild,” in our February issue, opens with a cat crawling up the chimney of its new house; Chera Hammons’s “Classroom Hatch” begins with a batch of chicks her husband has brought home from his fifth-grade class. From there these poems explore themes of wildness, safety, and the search for one’s place in the world—both for the animals and for the humans who interact with them. The poems make for beautifully complementary reading, and we hope you’ll take a minute to listen to the authors’ recordings of their work. Just click the Listen buttons below.

Take care and listen well,
Nancy Holochwost, Associate Editor

 

Wild
By Didi Jackson

When we moved our cat to our new house, 
the first thing he did was slip up
the chimney without doubt or fear 
after feeling a slight draft of cold air
escape from the fireplace’s black mouth.
He was looking for a way out. A way home.
He scrambled up what we’d thought would
become the heart of the house. Nothing
could lure him down. No food lifted on cardboard
or softly sung ballads. He wedged himself beyond
the narrow throat and sat on the smoke shelf,
safe in soot and ash.

When I was little, we didn’t have a fireplace.
Even though it could snow in Florida,
no one had flues to clean or creosote to peel
from brick, no ash thin as onionskin to watch
take wing and fly above flames. I was a sleepwalker
through most of those days. A passenger in
my own life. I couldn’t look
to my family and see myself reflected there. I was
born to no one. I was wild. A lawn full of dandelion seed heads,
lion’s-tooth, all waiting for breath. And when the water
seemed to hiss down by the lake, I knew it was
to me it called. You’ll have to do better than that, 
said the grackle, drinking at the water’s edge, 
wedged between reeds of cattails. To be wild, that is.

 

Classroom Hatch
By Chera Hammons

My husband tells me every chick his fifth graders
took home last year died cruelly:

crushed by younger siblings
or drowned after falling into

a basin of water. One timid girl’s dog
swallowed her chick whole

the moment she set it down,
believing it to be an offering.

This year we have already
had enough of senseless loss.

So he brings the chicks home,
and in our fragrant kitchen

we can hear them chirp, chirp, chirp
from their plastic bin in the garage. Asking for what?

They flee to the corners when we feed them,
trembling and trilling loudly in alarm.

When I was little, I had a duckling
that slept in my lap while I read,

and later I had a white rabbit kit
I carried with me in a sock

when my mother went into the houses
of the wealthy to do their ironing.

They used to ask her to salt the snails
that lived behind their cool green hedges, too,

and she would. We are all set into a day
that we can’t live beyond, and I know this.

I try to feed the chicks mealworms from my hands,
crouching there sometimes for hours.

I can’t remember how
to make them believe in kindness.