I have two things sang the bird from the pin oak.Two things have I—the answer back.The world is in its message today.The world is in its keys. The sunin it flashes like a flag in pavilion,like a frog’s throat flashing in the sun.And there are things that must be said, I know,awful and simple as children yelling outour mother is dead.A fact will baptize a brain for a whilebut what makes the baptism stay—I have two things, sings the bird in the pin oaktwo things have I, the bird in the eaves.A tuning met and gone like the lookthe two hostages gavewhen they passedat the neutral middle of the bridge.
Little Song in the Locrian
Timmy Straw
Feature Date
- July 5, 2023
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from The Yale Review, Spring 2023.
Copyright © 2023 by Timmy Straw.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Spring 2023
New Haven, Connecticut
Yale University
Editor
Meghan O'Rourke
Managing Editor
Will Frazier
Since 1911, The Yale Review has been publishing new works by the most distinguished contemporary writers—from Virginia Woolf to Vladimir Nabokov, from Robert Frost to Eudora Welty. The journal’s pages have, for almost a century, been filled with the most exhilarating and astute writing of our times. Under the editorship of Meghan O'Rourke, a best-selling poet and memoirist, The Yale Review presents up-and-coming writers, explores the broader movements in American thought, science, and culture, and reviews the best new books in a variety of fields.
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