By Maria Popova
After breaking out of timidity with “Spell Against Indifference,” an providing of one other poem — this one impressed by a lovely piece of science news that touched me with its sonorous existential echoes.
THE HALF-LIFE OF HOPE
by Maria PopovaStrolling beneath the concrete cover
of Manhattan
I discover myself fascinated about
Charles B. Kaufmann
who
simply after the top
of the Second World Warfare
invented hen spikes
who
thought it a nice thought
to fang the roofs
of hospitals and banks,
to weaponize the libraries
to maintain the factor with feathers
from perching on our properties
to maintain the angels
from alighting.Twenty hen generations later
atop a maple tree
exterior a hospital in Belgium
a magpie has heisted
a thousand steel spikes
to make of them
a nest
to sing from it
the requiem
of the saved.
