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