ANOTHER FAILED POEM ABOUT STARLINGS
Sandra Beasley
“I’ll have a starling that shall be taught
to speak nothing but ‘Mortimer,’ and give it
to him to keep his anger still in motion.”
—Henry VI, Act I, Scene 3
You need to know they have no call
of their own, only what they are given.
You need to know Eugene Schieffelin
was rich, and dreamed of bringing
the birds of Shakespeare to America,
and as he stood in Central Park releasing
handfuls of starlings, Sturnus Vulgaris,
we applauded as they settled in the eaves
of the museum. Now,
100 years and 200 million starlings later,
their fat mimicry crowds every nest—
They rise in flocks of 10,000,
devour cherries by the metric ton,
wrestle small planes to the ground.
You need to know we’ve tried everything:
plastic owls, Cobalt-60, our government’s
best recipe for Starling Pie. In Illinois,
a man is teaching starlings to speak,
wiring his farm with the murmur
of Schieffelin, Schieffelin, Schieffelin, so that
we might know the monster by the name
of his Frankenstein. You need to know
how light they were, lifting from his hands,
their bodies shimmering with hunger.
Sandra Beasley won the 2009 Barnard Women Poets Prize for I Was the Jukebox, selected by Joy Harjo and forthcoming from W. W. Norton. Her first collection, Theories of Falling, won the 2007 New Issues Poetry Prize judged by Marie Howe. She lives in Washington, D.C.
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