"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
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Kevin McLellan is the author of Hemispheres (Fact-Simile Editions, 2019), Ornitheology (The Word Works, 2018), [box] (Letter [r] Press, 2016), Tributary (Barrow Street, 2015), and Round Trip (Seven Kitchens, 2010). He won the 2015 Third Coast Poetry Prize and Gival Press’ 2016 Oscar Wilde Award, and his poems appear in numerous literary journals including Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, Kenyon Review Online, West Branch, Western Humanities Review, and many others. Also, with Laura Knott, he co-wrote, co-directed, and co-produced a short experimental film, Exordium. Kevin lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts and you can find out more about him here: https://kevmclellan.com/ Photo by Jonathan Sach

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