Bone Poem by Claudia Emerson

Bone

Rating: 2.8


It was first dark when the plow turned it up.
Unsown, it came fleshless, mud-ruddled, nothing
but itself, the tendon's bored eye threading
a ponderous needle. And yet the pocked fist
of one end dared what was undone
in the strewing, defied the mouth of the hound
that dropped it.
The whippoorwill began
again its dusk-borne mourning. I had never
seen what urgent wing disembodied
the voice, would fail to recognize its broken
shell or shadow or its feathers strewn
before me. As if afraid of forgetting,
it repeated itself, mindlessly certain.
Here.
I threw the bone toward that incessant claiming,
and watched it turned by rote, end over end over end.

COMMENTS OF THE POEM
Lamont Palmer 18 December 2009

Her 2nd book of poetry won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005. Heartfelt poems with depth. Not an easy achievement. -LP

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