ducklings

inside the bone blood & yes even the grain of morning
as in the wing of this mother duck nesting down

in the damp patch of lawn my creaky mower wheel
annually sinks in come summer - a few insects buzzing

it is spring not summer but it all comes back to me
the iridescence of her mate the march toward life

she is another waddling year older familiar as i am
with this contusion of earth this place where

underground springs outflow a momentary abundance
of snowmelt spills into our garden & they return to us

a credulous couple among all the world's fertile places
& this one only will do for their great ritual brooding -

three fearless cadets this year a new line of ducklings

oboe music
foretelling the passage beyond spring among squirrel bones
uncovered where dead autumn like decayed leaf clots

huddled in groundcover you discover a single tendril
yellow & sunless as your own blind infancy

the crow-raucous morning emptying out into day
& being entombed so beneath this earthen this miniature

barrow divine the gods quaking in spent wombs - but they
are not

^

Biography

Four time New York Press Association Writer of the Year nominee George Wallace is an award winning poet and journalist living and working on Long Island. His first chapbook, Tie Back the Roses, was published by Explicitly Graphic in England in 1986 and sold out within months. The Milking Jug was published by Cross Cultural Communications in 1988. In 1993, Tales of a Yuppie Dropout (Writers Ink) and Butterflies and Other Tattoos Bootleg Press) were released. Yuppie Dropout is in its second printing. His fifth chapbook of poems, The Poems of Augie Prime was published by Writers Ink in the summer of 1999, and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.