Honour Mack, Emergence, 2015 (Artist Website)
Oil & acrylic on canvas
52” x 52”
A mockingbird chick weighs less than your eye,
but hark to the rising squeals beyond the double pane—
like bagpipes, like trains, like Tuvans
hitting two pitches at once, only desperate.
I go outside, and deep in my abelia,
spy the yellow funnels of mouths
unhinged to an impossible angle.
In the novel I just finished, the narrator
takes up the tangled roots of the word list,
from Old English lystan,
“to cause pleasure or desire, provoke longing.”
Every few minutes, a parent flies to the nest
with a beetle or a worm. I thought I’d never
crave that pleasure again. The beck, the call,
keeping the hatched from death. My first
was born disconsolate. Fussy, my mother said.
I could have driven away to another city, traveled
to a distant country. I could have left the planet.
But oh, those screams.