Hawaiian Chicken – Not a Recipe
A fine flock of feral chickens
flutters and budgets beside Pali Highway
Feathers ruffle, rusted by the rain,
downy breast dusted black with mildew.
Rooster-kin, alert, proprietary, swift-eyed,
herds his wind-up chicks toward the hen harem.
Tiny brains in weensy heads search out
tasty bits, wriggling worms, juicy grubs
Scratching, slicing with skeletal yellow feet
in rotted leaves at the edge of the forest
Raging traffic roars a foot away
as unreal to them as distant galaxies are to us.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
What Stirs That Bird?
What stirs that bird in the night?
He should be sleeping, silent,
yet he rips the curtain of sleep
with his sharp beak, a tweak
in time. The clock says three,
but for me, it might be two or four,
I just want to shut the door on him.
It's not right, this time of night.
His job is to herald the dawn,
not caw like the spawn of the fiend.
I leaned toward liking birds and their song,
but this one's gone wrong, he's waking the bats,
scaring the cats, maybe it's rats that have climbed
in the tree where he and his family are housed
and roused him to raucous defense.
My fear is that for me to hear him
is a slim omen of evil, a thought
like a weevil that burrows so deep
in my heart, the innocent start
of another dark night of the soul.
* Alice Folkart is a poet and short story writer living on the island of Oahu in Hawaii
