WORLD VOICES

THIS IS THE ONE WHO WILL LEAVE
  BY KERRY HARDIE


Contents

Home
Introduction
Dedication
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Thrush
Last Swim of the Day
Negation
The Satin Gown
October
Protecting the Buds
She Will Try Again to
     Recover Again

The Rough and the Smooth
A man died in the valley
     today,

What Happened to the
     Soviet Union

After the Prize
Porcelain Man
Being Here
Fear
On Reading Michael
     Longley's Snow Water

Reflection
Waning
Emigration Photo
California
Letter from the Old World
     to a Brother in the New

Sky
Domestic War
Grace
Freda Kahlo Goes Native
All Saints

World Voices Home

The Literary Explorer
Writers on the Job
Books Forgotten
Thomas E. Kennedy
Walter Cummins
Web Del Sol



Thrush

It always begins the same way.
The pup is absorbed
down there where fruit-net and thorn-trees
funnel the gloom.
A crouch and a pounce.
Something is thrashing and crying.
She pounces again. 

My voice demands her and she comes. 

There must be a way through I haven't found
where songbirds—blackbirds, thrushes—go
to turn the soil for worms.
Then, panicked by the pup they rush full-flight
into the drapes and foldings of the net. 

It's quiet now, the wet air stirs
the wind-chimes in an empty tree. 

I catch the trapped bird in my hand
and, sliding scissor blades beneath the down,
cut strand on strand. It strains, a fresh blood marks
the soft grey stuff of breast, the mottled throat.

Then suddenly its head turns and it strikes.
It strikes again, oblique, the angle poor,
eye fixed, beak wide, an empty silent gape
like those old tales where tongues
were wrenched away to stop all witness— 

It stills, I still. It watches from a life
intense as mine. The last strand gives. A wing-rush
and it's gone into the dusk beyond the thorns.