#chickens

“When the electricity shuts off, you boil water, you crack ice.”

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 15 Comments

In addition to showing up at Dartmouth-Hitchcock for chemo and consults to save my life, which thankfully appears to be going nicely, I also joined a writing group the hospital offers. Because writing saves lives, too.

Here’s a poem I read in this class, too good not to pass along.

“Chickens” by Kate Gale

I come from hay and barns, raising  
chickens. In spring, lambs come.  

You got to get up, fly early, do the orphan run  
sleep till dawn, start the feeding.  

When the electricity shuts off, you boil water, you crack ice.  
You keep the animals watered.  

You walk through the barn, through the hay smell, 
your hair brittle where you chopped it with scissors  

same ones you use for everything. Your sweater has holes.  
When you feed the ram lambs, you say goodbye.  

Summer, choke cherries; your mouth’s dry. Apples, cider.  
Corn picking. Canning for weeks that feel like years.  

Chopping heads off quail, rabbits, chickens.  
You can pluck a chicken, gut it fast.  

You find unformed eggs, unformed chicks.  
They start chirping day nineteen.  

You make biscuits and gravy for hundred kids  
serve them up good. You’re the chick  

who never got past day nineteen, never found your chick voice.  
You make iced tea. They say, you’re a soldier in the king’s army.  

At night, you say to yourself, Kathy, someday.  
We go walking. We go talking. We find a big story.  

A cracking egg story. A walking girl story.  
A walking out of the woods story. A not slapped silly story.  

A not Jesus story. Hush, Kathy you say, we get out of here.  
We find out where chicks go when they learn to fly.

No Liberty for Chickens

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

On this Independence Day…. I’m reminded that my daughters’ ancestors on the little wooden Mayflower pledged their lives together (well, the men did) in a Civil Body Politic for the general good of the Colony. 399 years later, our neighbor stands on our back porch, clipping our chickens’ wings. History’s great swoop, and our daily fretting. Which, perhaps, is all I can say, as we head into another election season.

We must hang together.

— John Hancock

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Fleeting World

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Last night, in the dark, I walked behind the barn and closed the chickens’ little door to keep out marauders. The golden hen was on the step inside the door, her little head tucked down into her feathers. I sunk my fingers into her soft feathers and spoke to her. In the window just above her head, the moonlight reflected back in my eyes. In this sweet May night, redolent with lilacs and cut grass, it seemed impossible that anything adverse would happen to these little creatures. In a nicer world, I would have left the door open so the birds might sleep under the sky.

I locked the door against the fox.

In the chilly night, I stood with my daughter admiring the moon, in her final week of being age 12.

But the world is in motion, we are but small pieces, and control is an illusion. We make our own luck, our own destiny, but only to a point, and we never know what could happen at any moment—

— Carl Hoffman, Savage Harvest

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