Sonnet for the Chickens
The picture of elegance, my grandfather.
I wanted his photograph in the dictionary.
Alone of the men I knew as a kid,
he always wore a shirt with a collar,
always shined his shoes. Equanimity
in a family on the run from itself.
He amazed me once with a cardboard box
of baby chicks, each in a small square as if
he’d waved a wand over a carton of eggs.
A fuzz of feathers, beaks and fragile lives.
No more afraid than all of us, he said.
Just sit with them, tell them apart, listen.
Only if you see someone, can you become
someone. Long gone, he still is and they are.
Copyright © 2025 by Tom Healy. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on January 14, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.
