"A Whiter Shade of Pale - Wet Crows Study 1" by Patrick Doheny
Poetry

Crows With Sun

By · On August 30, 2015

CROWS
a determined
them sometimes
on the branches
of today you left
remain now as
a question
in dark things
WITH SUN
crowd of
companions
stain the brightness
a year since you chose to leave
not quite a shadow and
I see you
in white on white

 

 

 

Click here to read Kevin McLellan on the origin of the poem.

Photo: “A Whiter Shade of Pale – Wet Crows Study 1” by Patrick Doheny ; licensed under CC BY 2.0

Kevin McLellan:

Our world is divided into half or rather halves:

He and she. The straights and the gays. The east and the west. The terrorists and the defenders. Those and these and this and that. The police and the protestors. The north and the south. The legal and the illegal. The Republicans and the Democrats. Us and them and we and they. And so forth and so on…

So all these polarities. Or rather hemispheres.

Perhaps we might benefit from at least some minimal integration, physical or otherwise? Perhaps we might consider the other? Or rather the other side? Perhaps there is some common information on both sides? Or rather each side? Isn’t the nature of hemispheres to contribute to the whole, in their apartness and togetherness?

Please consider that the nature of polarity is fertile with possibilities.

This quadratic construction, the implementation of language separation, is poised for negotiation. A framework for language to cross borders, and through its migration increase the possibility to redefine the what within, and consequently the temporal.

Kevin McLellan

Kevin McLellan

Kevin McLellan is the author of Tributary (Barrow Street, 2015), and the chapbooks Shoes on a wire (Split Oak, 2015) runner-up for the 2012 Stephen Dunn Prize in Poetry and Round Trip (Seven Kitchens, 2010), a collaborative series of poems with numerous women poets. He has recent or forthcoming poems in journals including: American Letters & Commentary, Barrow Street, Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, Kenyon Review Online, Spoon River Poetry Review, Western Humanities Review, Witness, and numerous others. Kevin lives in Cambridge MA.

Photo by Jonathan Sach
Kevin McLellan

Latest posts by Kevin McLellan (see all)

Kevin McLellan is the author of Tributary (Barrow Street, 2015), and the chapbooks Shoes on a wire (Split Oak, 2015) runner-up for the 2012 Stephen Dunn Prize in Poetry and Round Trip (Seven Kitchens, 2010), a collaborative series of poems with numerous women poets. He has recent or forthcoming poems in journals including: American Letters & Commentary, Barrow Street, Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, Kenyon Review Online, Spoon River Poetry Review, Western Humanities Review, Witness, and numerous others. Kevin lives in Cambridge MA. Photo by Jonathan Sach

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