Listening to the Cock*
I lived and worked in America. As the years passed by, I did not grow any younger.
Marc Chagall.
New York! New York! O my America!
my new-found land of skyscrapers and hope
as the millions walk their walk to death.
You cannot leave your life behind you.
Death walks beside you. Death is there.
And Listening to the Cock is not America.
The cockerel is its own red background,
with acrobatic legs and gaudy head,
a fiddler fiddling in the bird’s tail-feathers.
And do you see the egg the cockerel
waits to lay, male and female together!
I thought that was witty. I thought that was love,
like the cow turning its eyes towards us,
on its face the faces of two young lovers.
They said the images were old Chagall ciprobuyonline.org/ –
the crescent moon, the tree on its head –
but the cockerel’s crow wakes a new dawn,
my ruddy dawn lighting the world of lovers.
Is that hope? Is that America?
New York! New York! O my America!
my new found land of skyscrapers and hope.
*1944
William Bedford’s poetry has appeared Agenda, The Dark Horse, The Frogmore Papers, Encounter, ink sweat & tears, The Interpreter’s House, The John Clare Society Journal, London Magazine, The Malahat Review, The New Statesman, Poetry Review, Poetry Salzburg Review, The Tablet, Temenos and The Warwick Review. Red Squirrel Press published The Fen Dancing in March 2014 and The Bread Horse in October 2015. He won first prize in the 2014 London Magazine International Poetry Competition.