Why Eat Why Kill

how hunger boy
mercer must you
brain crane lay

over lap one
dream broom
person starved

down chaff
rain pencil
shaving ego 

peck of
pimpled flesh
on fire

eat burnt crane
eat burnt crane
eat burnt crane

who your gods then
while you wait
for the soupbird to unshade yr life 

in who the cleated teeth
of rain
in mist

in whom the fired
sibilant remnants
a passing

storm’s little
unsuccessful denials
of fire

inside every song
another song
fruit teaches this

white sun flesh
the seed at the breast
thread wrestled button the

crane
burnt
eaten

can’t stack a day’s
strength a night’s
rest at the unravel hotel

truly hungry fools
dream too but
not of confluences

not of gardenias
not of pedigrees 
not the stony feats of insomniac sentinels

mothered
by the
killing maze

milk like junk wool
milk like gauze
milk like hesitancy

might as well
eat your own cane
god and crawl
 

Credit

Copyright © 2016 by Abraham Smith. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 18, 2016, by the Academy of American Poets.

About this Poem

“‘Why Eat Why Kill’ is the first poem in a newly begun manuscript within which I consider cranes. They’ve meant so much to me: the songs and statures of deeper dirt time and dearer personal safety; they’ve meant so much to everyone, everywhere: loci of loyalty and devotion. I am delighted to bow—if awkwardly—towards my buoy birds for a time.”
—Abraham Smith