Beaks, Stalkers, Buzzards: Black-crowned Night Heron, Immature (I think. Please correct me if I mis-identify); Great Egret, stalking; below, Turkey Vulture, "ghosted" by over-exposing a bit.
Birdwatchers of America by Anthony Hecht : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.
Though a minor leaguer, I’m a birder of some kind, so I thought I’d post this poem by Anthony Hecht as a gesture toward my open-mindedness and the not-so-Romantic sense of realism with which I try to maintain some contact.
Hecht is known as quite the traditionalist with regard to rhyme and meter and erudition. That can be impressive, but it can also be off-putting, cold, distant, or superior in the bad way. That might account for my struggle with the opening stanza, which I find difficult—not exactly impenetrable, but unwelcoming, its logic a little hard to follow, its necessity in the poem questionable.
But the second stanza picks up in clarity and appeal, and the third really brings things home with a vengeance in its knockout turn in the last few lines. So much for purty birdies, fuzzy puppies, and free popcorn.
(Try not to be confused by the layout at the beginning; the epigraph by Baudelaire bleeds into Hecht's title, an unusual formatting problem for Poetry Foundation).
Birdwatchers of America by Anthony Hecht : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.
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