LABAN CARRICK HILL - POEMS

​Laban Carrick Hill is the author of more than 40 books for children, young adults and adults. His children’s picture book When the Beat Was Born: DJ Kool Herc (Roaring Brook 2014) recently won the 2016 Texas Bluebonnet Book Award. My children’s picture book Dave the Potter: Artist Poet Slave (Little, Brown 2010) earned a Caldecott Honor and a Coretta Scott King Award and was a New York Times bestseller. My cultural history Harlem Stomp! A Cultural History of the Harlem Renaissance (Little Brown 2004) was a National Book Award Finalist, a New York Times bestseller and honored with more than 25 awards. Hill currently lives in Vermont where he teaches high school English and is working on a novel and a book of poems.

​                     Silencing Prettyboy Et Al.

 
Songbirds never
sing in fall, their
 
voices mute after
mating work is done.
 
Plump and heavy,
they wing their way,
 
drunken bikers
lurching from branch
 
to branch to branch
as autumn rushes through
 
sugar and red maples,
ash and dogwoods,
 
and finally stubborn oaks,
always the last to drop
 
their leaves, curled and rotting
like the fists of the dead.
 
No more prettyboy, menotyou, queedle.
No more trees uttering copious leaves.
 
This is the time
for turning inward, holding
 
onto what you’ve got, and
hunkering down in dense cedars
 
with all you can gather so as not
to die before the January thaw.
 

                         Squirrel at the Feeder
                                                                      for Frank O’Hara

 
Vladimir Putin invades the Ukraine!
I am sitting at the window watching
the red, red cardinal hog the feeder
so drunk on seeds he couldn’t be
bothered to crack them open, singing
prettygirlprettygirlprettygirl,
the frenzied squirrel below skitters
the hard-pack like a Jesus
Christ lizard sprinting across pond scum,
Yanukovych believes menotyou
menotyoumenotyou will stop them, the blue
jay muscles the cardinal, the
goldfinches clothed in winter
flora camo anticipate in the dense
cedar hedge until these
super powers become bored or
drain the feeder, below the
squirrel claws at the siding
to gain height, the blue jay goes
queedlequeedlequeedlequeedle
too large to actually feed from the trough
but uninterested in relinquishing
his perch, no sleight of wing even
imagined, the carcass of Hugo
Chavez rots somewhere in
Venezuela, the squirrel finds his
launch on the silver vent cap,
slate colored juncos, purple finches, tufted tit-
mice, Turchynov yells goawaygoa
waygoawaygoaway, Ban Ki-moon
gravelyconcerned, the goldfinches
are greener and greener,
the squirrel has it all figured out.
 

 

​                              Landscape #1: Bluff

 
Your elbow juts
about my ribcage
boney flesh to cardigan
you say I want to
touch you crumpled paper
anodized aluminum my
body defies your ribbing
my chest retards
the onslaught just
partially collapsed
or so it seems I
exhale my belt
acts as ramparts for
my buttocks I inhale
my skin realigns
itself you say we
are only touching
I feign soil erosion
and sight the bluffs
of Idaho the water
table shrinking
the dry unceasing summers
against a backdrop of
sky something must
be done I cite
my faulty ribs my heart’s
escarpments