Rooster

Rooster

At first crack
in dawn’s black eggshell
my neighbor’s rooster crows
with a voice
like rusty tap water. He knows
nothing about
childhood asthma rates
from a nearby freeway,
or the incinerator on High Street
that burns up medical wastes
and spews poison.
He dreams of a harem of plump hens,
but poverty has forced him to be monogamous
with one scrawny, lackluster egg-layer,
so he makes do like the rest of us.
O inner-city rooster
with scabby red wattles
and tough yellow feet
to pick though the asphalt and pebbles,
precious souvenir
of my exiled ranchero neighbor
who cultivates a towering cornfield
on his tiny scrap of lawn and scatters birdseed at 6 A.M.
before he leaves for the first of three
factory jobs. Last poet
of the barnyard in Mexico,
with its dawn horses and clean air,
you goad is with your call:
Wake up! Wake up! The sun is rising! It is I,
cacophonous prophet of morning,
who brought it forth!
How many times have I heard you
form the gray depths f sleep,
or from waking alone
in the silence of my own sweaty dream.
Brother Rooster, displaced
ghetto oracle,
rouster-out-of-bed, world-jouster,
like you am directed to bungle
praises to dirt and light,
morning after morning,
no matter what.

by Alison Luterman

from The SunDecember 2004

zilla

zilla
Originally uploaded by cameronalexander.

Here is the chicken that inspired a blog and fed a small group.

Garden from the Fir

tall tree view
Originally uploaded by cameronalexander.

The Straw Bale House

Here it is

Here I write as a dog is sick in a hospital; a dog I love. What a good teacher grief is for me! There are the emotions right there, visceral and at the surface.