Father Of Their Easy Captivity Poem by Robert Rorabeck

These words may fall from my fingertips
Like gentled children
From their mother’s breasts down into cribs,
But I do not know where they come from,
Save that there is gossip from the fields
From the tawny women whom winnow
The wheat in pollinated swaths of bucolic rapture,
That they have heard them once feral
And ill-natured running unwashed through the
Great forests of northern France,
Before the king sent for chorus girls sequined
And feathered
Like song birds, their bosoms a perplexing ruby
Cleaved in a powdery river;
Thus was his plan, to capture the lycanthropes
Before they erased themselves, and calm them
And pluck them as peacocks paraded on pink marble,
The stones themselves raided from the virgin’s grotto,
And put them here, now strolling along the concrete
Sidewalks of suburbia, where there are holidays,
And peaceful alligators glutted in the drainage,
And the sombulence of housewives, their secrets
In smooth blue cabinets, and ceiling fans that hypnotize;
Thus they fall down, teeth cleaned, bodies clothed
For the following morning’s play,
And they go to sleep well fed but with short attentions.
They do not remember whom they belong to,
Nor should I concede to the committee before me,
To being their father of the easy captivity.