I’ve got to share a poet. He’s a faculty member in the program where I’m currently a student, which is how I encountered him. When he reads, I feel like I’m in church. His book, Lawrence Booth’s Book of Visions (2001 Yale University Press) knocked my socks off last winter. His new book, The Gone and the Going Away is out this spring from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. It is currently knocking my socks off. Read below and I promise you will understand. I do promise that, to all of you who think poetry is somehow beyond you, or that it is for the smarter people, the esoteric idiots, or the fruitcakes. His name is Maurice Manning, from Kentucky, and I promise, you will understand him.
Pilgrims
Here come the crows!
with their fat gleaming breasts,
their leathery feet, their nutcracker beaks,
their perilous eyes and tribal squawks,
their famous longevity, and all
the other noble crow traditions!
They look like low shadows from an odyssey,
strutting along the hem of the Great Field,
like high-born magi shaking off the desert,
or perhaps weary cartographers, or messengers,
or brave pioneers. And what good fortune!—
Booth can give them sanctuary—he has a near
plenitude, with the thirty-seven acres, the Great Field,
the tip-topping trees, the blithe creek,
and he is half-lathered from wildly galloping
around to make them welcome, kowtowing
and paving their way with a trail of cracked corn
and sunflower seed. Oh, send word to the tiny wrens,
the speckled finches, the hoot owls, and all the other
immigrants: the black darlings of the field and sky,
the raven-tressed wayfarers, are at last arrived!
from Lawrence Booth’s Book of Visions
by Maurice Manning
Yale University Press, 2001
reprinted with permission