If I Were A Sparrow – Poem of the Week

If I were a sparrow, people might mystify me

But then, people mystify me sometimes anyway. Being human doesn’t necessarily help me out with understanding other humans. A sparrow, in fact, might have as a good a chance as I do.

This week’s poem is a prose poem. Prose poems are getting a lot of interest lately. The newest prose poem anthology is Penguin Book’s: The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem: From Baudelaire to Anne Carson, edited by Jeremy Noel-Tod.

This new anthology covers prose poems from Aloysius Bertrand (1842) to Golan Haji (2018, translated from Arabic by Haji and Stephen Watts). Never mind the title references to Baudelaire and Anne Carson who are more famously associated with the prose poem but who are represented by poems from 1869 and 1995, respectively.

All anthologies are, by definition, incomplete, but selecting a scant couple hundred poems to define progression in a form over about 175 years seems like a difficult undertaking.

Yet, never mind defining progression of the prose poem. Just try defining the prose poem itself. Answers to and arguments about that question already fill plenty of books and articles. Noel-Tod acknowledges the difficulty of this up-front in his introduction, saying:

How, then, to define the prose poem? After reading so many, I can only offer the simplest common denominator: a prose poem is a poem without line breaks.

Noel-Tod, Jeremy. The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem: From Baudelaire to Anne Carson (Penguin Hardback Classics) (p. xix). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

Well, that is an unsatisfactory definition. Yet, it is one I default to myself. It’s like the old definition of quality: I know it when I see it. So too, we know prose poems when we see them. It’s got to do not just with form (lack of line breaks) but with content that is specifically poetic, regardless whether it is narrative or not. The prose poem therefore lives on the border between obviously lineated poetry and obviously lyrical prose. It’s a mash-up. And I could spend all day in a circular pursuit of the definition. Or we could just skip to this week’s poem:

If I were a Sparrow

I’d wonder why so much rushing about, always going somewhere. Is there a juicy beetle you’re searching for? It seems about the same to me, the trash you bring in and out of your nests, which have nothing on the magpies’ desolations. Are you ready for winter, do you have a hole to hide from gust and icicle? 

So odd and individually ugly, you wrap and  unwrap yourselves as if wrapping would protect your hearts, lungs, livers. Did the Pharaohs not teach that this swaddling leads only to dust? Ah to scatter on my back that which suffocates the tiny pestilences, the mites and scorns. To sweep my wings then clang and dash and shake the worst away–

Maybe you don’t have the sense to hide because there are so many of you. Such grasping after the fledglings, as if it were a state to be admired. You never push them out. That urge to prune, control. You don’t know wild, do you? Don’t know excess or wastrel. Leaving behind so much, you touch all you can, evidence of your passage sours even the air.

Still, some of you I find clinging under the bridges, hiding from the day and the night. Some singing to yourselves. Off key. Alone. Layered and layered in your damaged plumage.

Your hand print is clear as any sunlit flower or wing, flash of beak, ant or worm. I hear them, see them. How can you not see your own track? Trees full of tiny green apples.  So many of you are not starving, it must be obvious.

If you enjoyed If I were a Sparrow

You’ll find more of my poems on this blog or in the collection Stars Crawl Out From Their Caves, which is available in both ebook and print.  

If you like prose poems, you can also read this one that I wrote: Sisyphean.

Missed a poem of the week? Links to prior weeks are on this page.