Customer Reviews

Eugene J. McCarthy: Selected Poems

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Eugene McCarthy went to Lyndon Johnson's ranch and refused

to shoot one of the tame deer Johnson kept as hunting stock.

Perhaps that was a factor in Humphrey's being selected

rather than McCarthy as LBJ's running mate.

McCarthy spent some time in a monastery as a young man

before he entered public life.

His antiwar position galvanized the nation and caused the

withdrawal of Lyndon Johnson from the presidential race.

There is never an excess word in McCarthy's brilliant

and compassionate poetry.

THE DEATH OF THE OLD PLYMOUTH ROCK HEN

-by Senator Eugene McCarthy-

It was tragic when her time came

After a lifetime of laying brown eggs

Among the white of leghorns.

Now, unattractive to the rooster,

Laying no more eggs,

Faking it on other hens' nests,

Caught in the act,

Taken to the woodpile

In the winter of execution.

A quick stroke of the axe,

One first and last upward cast

Of eyes that in life

Had looked only down,

Scanning the ground for seeds and worms

And for the shadow of the hawk.

Now those eyes are covered

By yellow lids,

Closing from the bottom up.

Decapitated, she did not act

Like a chicken with its head cut off.

No pirouettes, no somersaults,

No last indignity.

Like an English queen, she died.

On wings that had never known flight.

She flew, straight into the woodpile,

And there beat out slow death

While her curdled voice ran out in blood.

A scalding and a plucking of no purpose.

No goose feathers for a comforter.

No duck's down for a pillow.

No quill for a pen.

In the opened body, no entrail message for the haruspex.

Not one egg of promise in the oviduct.

In the gray gizzard, no diamond or emerald,

But only half-ground corn,

Sure evidence of unprofitability.

The breast and legs,

The wings and thighs,

The strong heart,

The pope's nose,

Fit only for chicken soup and stew.

And then in March, near winter's end,

When bloodied and feathered wood is used,

The odor of burnt offerings

Above the kitchen stove.

-Eugene McCarthy-