Barbara A. Meier
The Raven at Riley Creek
The raven comes to school everyday at 1:15
to peruse the pea gravel for kindergarten snacks:
a pretzel bite here, granola crumbs there,
goldfish that have never seen the sea.
He perches, because that’s what passorines do.
His raison eyes intent on prey.
He’s not come to learn or play.
He comes to dine with the children.
He’s the watchman on the baseball backstop,
with his dark licorice wedge of a tail.
Predator. Prophet. Performer.
He is the mediator between work and play.
He knows cause and effect and when to forage.
Cawing and croaking, convincing the children
to spare him a "soupçon" which they surely wouldn’t miss.
Making promises with a wink and a shrug.
He’s the trickster who’s not always kind.
I watch him as I do my recess duty.
His shaggy sooty feathers ruffle in the wind.
“Really, why are we here? I query him.
To work? To play? To dine on crumbs of numbers
and letters? Predicting with data? Preying on funds,
and performing on computer screens?
There is no mediation for the children.
They are the fragments of a society
let out to play before they mold away
in crummy classrooms, with dirty floors
and broken monkey bars.
The raven and I dine on such data as this-
bonny eyes, cracker crumbs,
and child hair to build a nest.
The wind rustles in the trees overhead,
you caw out your name as the bell rings,
and glancing back to the empty playground
I see you hopping on your two feet.
You leave me with a wink, and a cracker in your beak.
Barbara A Meier teaches kindergarten in Gold Beach, OR, where she continually frets over how to get five-year-olds to start a sentence with an uppercase letter, end with a period, and make sense. In her spare time, she looks for agates, petrified wood, and fossils on the beautiful Southern Oregon beaches. She has been published in The Poeming Pigeon, Cacti Fur, Highland Park Poetry, and Poetry Pacific. https://basicallybarbmeier.wordpress.com/
The Raven at Riley Creek
The raven comes to school everyday at 1:15
to peruse the pea gravel for kindergarten snacks:
a pretzel bite here, granola crumbs there,
goldfish that have never seen the sea.
He perches, because that’s what passorines do.
His raison eyes intent on prey.
He’s not come to learn or play.
He comes to dine with the children.
He’s the watchman on the baseball backstop,
with his dark licorice wedge of a tail.
Predator. Prophet. Performer.
He is the mediator between work and play.
He knows cause and effect and when to forage.
Cawing and croaking, convincing the children
to spare him a "soupçon" which they surely wouldn’t miss.
Making promises with a wink and a shrug.
He’s the trickster who’s not always kind.
I watch him as I do my recess duty.
His shaggy sooty feathers ruffle in the wind.
“Really, why are we here? I query him.
To work? To play? To dine on crumbs of numbers
and letters? Predicting with data? Preying on funds,
and performing on computer screens?
There is no mediation for the children.
They are the fragments of a society
let out to play before they mold away
in crummy classrooms, with dirty floors
and broken monkey bars.
The raven and I dine on such data as this-
bonny eyes, cracker crumbs,
and child hair to build a nest.
The wind rustles in the trees overhead,
you caw out your name as the bell rings,
and glancing back to the empty playground
I see you hopping on your two feet.
You leave me with a wink, and a cracker in your beak.
Barbara A Meier teaches kindergarten in Gold Beach, OR, where she continually frets over how to get five-year-olds to start a sentence with an uppercase letter, end with a period, and make sense. In her spare time, she looks for agates, petrified wood, and fossils on the beautiful Southern Oregon beaches. She has been published in The Poeming Pigeon, Cacti Fur, Highland Park Poetry, and Poetry Pacific. https://basicallybarbmeier.wordpress.com/