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What Sparks Poetry is a series of original essays that explores experiences and ideas that spark the writing of new poems. In our new series of Ecopoetry Now, poets engage in an ecopoetic conversation across borders. Each Monday's delivery brings you the poem and an excerpt from the essay.
some asshole—forgive me—on a joyride in
the Outback runs her down, the emu,
and keeps going. After all, he's
got a planet to desecrate.

A very long line of
feathered-bloody-something, she's lifting now

and falling back to the road, not exactly
an ostrich but as lordly, and slower each time.

Don't fool yourself. It wasn't wind, not
a broken hinge crying out to open a door.

Our worthless offerings—

O Emu, here's our numb speechlessness.
But there are those who drive to
who-cares-if-I-kill and never regret. We willed
that news to her
medieval as prayer through all abruptly
stricken in the Flinders,

the handwringing two of us as

another acolyte stepped from his truck with a huge
plumber's wrench to bash her kindly
a good

one two three—

her ooaa each time faint, fainter
ooaa on a loop, a loop...

Reader, you who think poems
should never story too much or render
news of the day,

I need to get this right—

grief is human-speak for emu.
Night's quiet since then.
from the book BESTIARY DARK / Copper Canyon Press
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Color image of the cover of Marianne Boruch's latest book, Bestiary Dark
What Sparks Poetry:
Marianne Boruch on "SO WE GET THERE JUST AS"


"Words came later, by accident in a silent room at a desk. But back there, one afternoon in that desolate expanse my husband and I and a stranger, the three of us came together over that creature stricken by a fellow human we desperately wanted to disown, a driver hot to desecrate the planet. I can’t tell you the rage in me as that car grew smaller and smaller then slipped into nothing’s pure distance."
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Color photograph of Juan Felipe Herrera reading one of his poems before the California senate
Juan Felipe Herrera Receives Frost Medal

"His poems move as he moves—through nature, through working-class communities of color, through political protests—though it would be more accurate to say he moves with them, for while Herrera is a keen observer he is never just looking on." The Frost Medal recognizes and celebrates a poet's lifetime achievement.

via NBC
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