Chicken Dream Poem
Dreamed before 1983 by Hastings Wyman, Jr.
|
Row upon row
of wire cages contain thin and molting chickens whose eyes know life begins and ends within wire walls. A tall bluesuited woman, hair neatly |
tucked, opens
double doors. Hundreds of pure white chicks flood past her protests. Rabbits say No as chicks swarm into the garden. Children cup |
their hands
about the chicks and lift them to their smiles. "Now we know how, so we'll go where we choose," chirp chicks, hopping in spring grass. |
SOURCE: Dreamworks: an Interdisciplinary Quarterly (v.3, no.2, fall 1983, p.77)
EDITOR'S NOTE
This tall skinny chicken-poem almost certainly riffs on William Carlos Williams's classic little imagist poem:
|
So much depends
upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens |
But Wyman's theme is freedom. Who's being freed, though? Some inner side of Wyman? Or is it external, is the dream joyfully noting social change? If so, what? Animal liberation? Children? The elder chickens seem doomed, resigned, hinting at a generational shift. But given the date--when calling women chicks was still in vogue--they might well be women, too.
--Chris Wayan
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