Category Archives: Thomas Davis

October 22, 2011 · 6:49 pm

Unlike the song that I could sing,

if I had voice to make a song,

cold mist slips over red rock cliffs
and pours toward the valley floor
in falling streams of cloud-like veils.

In front of flowing mists cliffs jut
away from faces of the rock,
and sunshine lights afire the red
that burns the spirit of the rock alive.

The silence of the early morning song
is interrupted by the flash
of yellow on a black bird’s wings,
and then the liquid sound of birds
lifts from the valley’s desert floor

as mist slips over red rock cliffs
behind the sunfire streamed through clouds
into the pools of blackbird songs

unlike the song that I could sing.

Thomas Davis

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October 15, 2011 · 6:17 pm

Old Galrug, a Dragon Ballad

by Thomas Davis

Deep in the swamp inside a cave,
Inside obsidian
That rises shining from the mud
Beneath a midnight sun,
Old Galrug sits and broods about
When dragons have to run

From puny men so small and ugly
And insignificant
That dragons ought to have the strength
To breathe long flames and let the brunt
Of greatness cause a scurrying
By frightened, cowering runts.

But in the gloaming wilds where forests
Loom high above the ground,
Old Galrug, feasting on a stag,
Was startled by the sounds
Of horses jangling through the woods
And turned, his rage unbound.

His nostrils streamed with smoke and flame;
He roared alive the world.
The leading knight came charging through
The trees and swung and hurled
A shining strand of woven rope
Abruptly, swiftly curled

Around Old Galrug’s swaying neck.
His rage transformed to fright
As other knights came charging, ropes
Strung over ropes, winged flight
Impossible as yet more ropes
Bound wings to body, tight.

The knights drew swords and brandished them
As horses charged his flank.
The biting of the gnats drew blood.
He writhed his body, shrank
Away from blow that followed blow.
His raging mind grew blank.

As slashes, pricks of sharpened swords
Sucked life through grievous wounds,
He slashed his tail in his fear
And ripped his body from the goons
Surrounding him and ran into the forest’s
Twilit, welcome gloom–

And as he ran he shed the ropes
That bound his wings and tied
Him to the ground where men were loud
With rage and cursed his hide
And forced their frightened horses forward,
Hearts bent on dragoncide.

He flexed his wings and struggled up
Into the heavy air,
Blood flowing from his dozen wounds.
The cries of men’s despair
A music ringing in his ears,
He flew toward his lair.

But now, inside his cave, he brooded, thought
About the dragons killed
In wars as old as dragon-kind—
The way men gathered, filled
Themselves with dreams of bravery
And dragons’ heartbeats stilled.

Why did so many have to die?
He asked himself. He thought
About the solitary paths
That dragons always sought,
Protecting human gold and other wealth
Their wiles and cunning bought.

Our solitude is killing us,
He thought. It is our flaw.
Inside obsidian he blazed
Frustration as he saw
His weakness lay inside his self.
He gnashed his massive jaws

And spread his massive purple wings
And breathed his stomach’s fire
Into his throat and, wounded, sick,
Displayed his dreadful ire
By roaring at a midnight sun,
Expressing his desire

To end the plague of human brains
That worked to end his kind
And make the world a better place
For human hearts and minds
So they could live their sentience
While dragon life declined.

As fires built deep inside his belly,
He spread his purple wings
And launched into the sun-weird night,
His rage a dragon scream
That had no mind, no hope, no aim
Except destruction’s sting.

He flew inside his red-eyed pain
Until he found a human place.
He shrieked from skies, a shaft of hate
That hurtled, clawing grace
Into the humans screaming, running
As lives were smashed, erased.

Exulting in his power, hate,
Old Galrug tried to roll
Away from ground that loomed too fast,
But as he turned, the toll
Of injuries inside his hatred bled
A flaming aureole,

Filmed over eyes abruptly blind,
And struck into his hearts
As pain became the universe,
And life became a part
Of some lost dream that dragons dream
As life, at last, departs.

The dragon crashed into the ground
And wailing shivered skies
And dying humans reveled at the ending
Old Galrug faced, his cries,
Malevolence, now blind
As, wracked with pain, he died.

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October 8, 2011 · 10:46 am

The Lyric’s Gone

by Thomas Davis

As middle age begins to creep
into the muscles of the heart,
the lyric impulse starts to die,
and words that blinded with their flash
and dazzle start to plod and groan
inside their cage of sentence-flesh.

Still, love is still as bright, my love.
Its fires are not as blazing hot,
nor are its rhythms quite as full
of cleverness and silk delight.

Its rhythms lengthen out to merge
with other rhythms pulsing life
and time and thought and loving moods.

I love you still; it’s you I love.
The lyric’s gone, but still, we love.

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October 3, 2011 · 8:12 pm

Genius: Mildred and Bill

by Thomas Davis

To Mildred Hart Shaw and Paul Pletka

A sherry in her hand, surrounded by
the books that filled the room from floor to ceiling,
she watched the young man, self-absorbed, apply
a tiny brush to lead-framed glass, a feeling
of richness emanating from a scene
of large-eared rabbits sitting in the snow
beside a gully, mountains rising white, pristine,
into a winter sky that almost glowed.

The glass had traveled west a hundred years ago
strapped in a wagon pulled by two huge horses.
“That’s good,” she said. “It has a Christmas glow.
No rivers, but it sets the rivers in their courses.”

“A Christmas door,” he said. “It’s here, but then
you’ll wipe it clean to make it just a door again.”

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September 30, 2011 · 7:13 pm

A Life Piles Up in Heaps of Moments

by Thomas Davis

A life piles up in heaps of moments locked
Inside a memory that sputters like
An engine on a day when trees are frocked
In ice and cold coagulates and strikes

Into the spirit of mechanics, heart
Of arrogance engendered by humanity.
My mother, eighty-five and still as smart
As when a forest fire compelled her family

To flee the lumber camp in Colorado,
Remembers how she acted when a plate
Of deep-fried whistle-pig, her mother’s bravado,
Seemed like the inevitability of fate.

But yet she has no memory of what
My father faced at Anzio Beach in World War II
Where death walked sandy shores and lives were cut
From life as sunrise glinted light from morning dew.

My wife walked out onto a ridge as lines
of light streaked clouds down from a thunderous sky.
She did not see the stallion in its prime
Half merged into the land, its wild, deep eyes

Fixed on small tufts of dried-out grass and weeds–
Her life encased by all the great immensities
Surrounding her and him and all the seeds
Of memory that bloom, meander, flee.

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September 13, 2011 · 7:35 pm

The Poet and the Artist

by Thomas Davis

Inside the trailer sitting by a ditch,
the mixing bowl still clinging to the dough
that went into the oven hours before
to make the fresh-bread smell of early morning,
the poet, young, sat down to write a poem.
She pursed her lips and pledged a word to paper,
stopped, got up from the folding table, looked
as if a storm had started brewing thunderheads
behind her eyes, crossed out the word she’d written,
put down another word, and then another,
decided that the first line was not right,
crossed out the line, and searched for fire, for stone
grown out of ancient trees into a rainbow
of carbon, agate, life long gone remembered
in music swelled out of the lines she wrote.

She worked for hours, the crossed out words and lines
alive, then petrified into oblivion
across a half a dozen pages, images
half formed, then tossed away into the blaze
of other images born from the dance
of words dredged out of who she was inside
where light burned, thoughts danced, deep emotions swirled.

When, at long last, the poem was done, she shrugged,
picked up a stick of charcoal, stormed a portrait
of Pasternak, romantic, breathing, flaring
into his Russian world, onto a newsprint pad

and finished faster than the morning’s bread had cooled.

Pasternak, a Portrait
by Ethel Mortenson Davis

“Pasternak” originally appeared in The Rimrock Poets Magazine, Thomas Davis, Richard Brenneman, and Art Downing, editors, December 1967, Vol. 1, No. 1.

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September 11, 2011 · 4:13 pm

September 11, 2001

by Thomas Davis

1

On the road home, Jack Briggs in the back seat ill,
The first phenomenon we noticed was empty skies:
No silver airplanes glinting light, no white cloud trails,
An emptiness that had existed before the Wright brothers and Kitty Hawk
Stretching back to beginning birds, dragonflies, butterflies.

In Ohio we began to see people with flags on overpasses,
Sometimes just standing, other times waving at passing traffic.
Once or twice small clumps of people looked like they were singing.
We were driving fast and could not hear them.

2

I had been in the offices of Internet Two, where futures are building,
When the first plane hit the first of the Twin Towers in New York City.
A young technician, voice puzzled, went from office to office
Telling us we had better come into where big monitors were turned to CNN.
The first images of the first plane were exploding dread into consciousness
When the rumors started: The White House had been bombed;
The Pentagon had been hit; something awful was happening on the Mall;
A car bomb had exploded at the State Department.

Then, as two women started sobbing—they had friends working at the World
Trade Center—
After we had leaned back against walls, or wandered away in disbelief,
Or sat down numb before the large television screens,
The second plane exploded into the second tower,
A blossoming flare of flame slicing through steel and concrete
And human lives living high above New York City streets.

More people sat on chairs or on the floor; crying intensified.
You could feel the room’s fear and a cold, stomach queasy dread
That seemed like it could never end—not if the world was sane.
People had been sitting in the seats of those planes.
I had landed at Washington National Airport the day before.
I would fly in an airplane back to Duluth, Minnesota in four days.
People had been working in the offices when two planes had slammed fire
Into the innocence of a beautiful September sky.
I was sitting in an office watching as people died.

Then one rumor was confirmed. The Pentagon had just been hit.
Black smoke and fire were pouring into Washington sky.
I was in Washington. More attacks were expected.
Internet Two was to offload its responsibilities.
The federal government was to close its Washington offices.
The President was in Florida and was coming home.

A man visiting the offices came into the crowded monitor room looking
dazed.
“I went out for a smoke,” he said. “I decided to call home.
A Secret Service agent came out of nowhere and made me give him my cell.”

On the monitor a sober announcer said another plane was down
In a rural Pennsylvania field. Words swirled into rumors
Those still monitoring the Internet kept bringing into offices
Like sentry ravens blackly bent on telling the world
A pack of wolves had come hungry into the woods.

3

Later that night my young soldier-nephew met me at my hotel
After struggling against the flow of downtown Washington leaving.
Walking from Internet Two to the hotel I had passed a half dozen military
guards
On street corners, carrying rifles, looking nervous.
When Grant and I left the hotel into glorious evening
After discovering that cabdrivers, along with the other workers,
Had abandoned downtown and that most restaurants were closed,
We started walking toward Georgetown where you could still get a meal.
The great city was quieter than I would have believed possible.
The only people on the streets were nervous soldier holding loaded guns.
They looked straight at you as you walked past.
We had only walked a block when we saw the first Humvee,
Two soldiers standing in back holding guns to chests
As they kept scanning and scanning empty, darkening streets and sidewalks.

4

That night we rented a cot for Grant. The Metro was closed. There were no
cabs.
He could not make it back to base. He had to stay in my room.

5

In Chicago, driving past O’Hare , we saw the first plane we had seen in days.
Huge, military, black, loud, bristling with communication equipment,
It roared right over our heads. Startled, I jerked the steering wheel.

6

Then, after Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, we
were in Wisconsin.
In Indiana, at a gas station, a clerk had told me he had never seen so many
rental cars on the road.
We left cities behind and drove into greenness. The sun shined.
Once over the Minnesota border we opened car windows
And breathed Minnesota air and kept saying how good it was to be almost home.
People with flags were on every overpass and sometimes in an empty field.
You could see their flags, and them, coming
And then in the rearview mirror after you had passed.

7

Back home in Carlton, after dropping Jack Briggs, feeling better, in
Minneapolis
And Dave Wise, my other traveling companion, at home,
My wife and I walked down Munger Trail in the morning, beside Otter Creek.
Birds flitted from branch to branch in the trees.
A raven hopped onto the trail and looked quizzically at a rabbit two feet
away.
The creek sang, frothed, and tumbled toward the St. Louis River and Lake
Superior.
We breathed in the country that we were.
We sang the creek into our lungs and hearts.
We flitted in the pine, spruce, and poplar with sparrows, ravens, bluejays and
yellow finch.

8

We are American.
Bodies fell from the two towers in New York City
Before steel, glass, wood, bricks, and mortar collapsed into billowing black
clouds,
Spreading the environmental poisons of mankind
Into the lungs and hearts
Of streams of frightened people running from the clouds.
Black clouds rolled and cut us off from light and breath.

9

Beside Otter Creek my wife smiled,
And the water, birds, rabbit, wildflowers, brush, trees, grass, rocks,
And the earth surrounded us
And entered us
And knitted us connections
That flowed outward in concentric circles from where we were
Down the long road to DC into oceans, past islands, to distant continents
Where a dark-eyed, dark haired, dark skinned man and woman
Walked together by a creek or river or ocean shore
And felt the earth as I felt the earth,
As my wife felt the earth, that morning.

10

So I sing this song,
An American song,
That sings into the melody of a morning beside Otter Creek,
That sings into the swelling symphony earth
And all that is
Or yet may be.

The towers fell.
I saw them fall.
I saw black smoke billowing from a burning Pentagon.

This poem has been performed in Washington DC at the National Museum of the American Indian and in Carlton, Minnesota.

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September 1, 2011 · 7:59 pm

New Mexico Poets

a poem by Thomas Davis

Mexican red wolves stalk him.
The old man stops, listens to silence, sniffs air,
then turns, a great rack of horns growing suddenly out of dark hair,
his body thickening, elongating, black hooves where his feet were.
Wolves come into the sun struck meadow,
eyes alive with the hunt, tongues lolling out of open mouths as they run.
The old bull elk starts, crashes into aspen trees surrounding the meadow,
slams mountain earth with hooves, puffs of smoke
wisping behind enormous bounds as he flies uphill
toward the mountain peak’s dark rock and white snow.
As the elk flees the wolves run even lower to the ground,
blue and brown eyes riveted to the elk’s trail,
breaths deep and full as they run after their prey.

For hours the chase goes on.
The afternoon sun climbs to its zenith and blazes.
The elk moves from aspen to pine and spruce
into matted falls of timber in forests untouched by humans.
The wolves run in silence, intent on their hunt, howls held back
until the moment when they can leap on the great elk’s back
and bring it staggering violently toward the ground and death.

Then the elk, within sight of the tree-line and its stunted pines,
leaps into a circle of pine, spruce, and aspen
past rock ovens made with piled stones.
He jumps up on a massive sandstone platform built in the circle’s center.
Bluebirds, a golden eagle, sparrows, a great horned owl fly
out of the elk’s brown fur, the dark fur on its chest.
Jack rabbit hind legs thumping ground breaks silence.
Wind swirls inside the tree circle and sets aspen leaves,
deep grasses beside the sandstone platform, singing.
The great elk rises to its hind legs.
The wolf pack stops outside the circle of trees and glares fire
at the shrinking of the huge elk into an old man
with white hair and a back bent from hard years of living.

The wolf pack’s female leader steps hesitantly
toward the old man into the trees’ circle.
Inside the trees the wind swirls faster as the old man watches her.
Wolf hair transforms into human skin.
A young woman steps out of wolf shape
and stands with her slender right hand on one of the rock ovens.
Wolves outside the circle begin to howl;
their voices ring down mountain slopes,
shivering fear into mountain air, rock, and the snowy peak.
Clouds grow from sunlight into towering billows
that soar into late afternoon, blocking off the sun
and sending wind inside the trees
down and around the mountain and out into the world.

Roots start to grow out of the old man’s feet
into the barren density of sandstone.
Within seconds he stands as a ponderosa pine,
branches snaking out in different directions from the red trunk,
top branches so high they scrape the dark bottoms of thunderheads.

The young woman watches the old man becoming a tree.
Her face is as calm and serene
as a lake surface when the universe stops
and no ripple mars the water’s sky-mirror perfection.
She turns from the ponderosa pine
and turns toward the pack grown silent and watchful.

“The earth lives,” the woman says.

She lifts her arms and tips her head toward the cloud roiled sky.
White feathers spread over her body;
a black beak with a yellow bridge running to bird eyes grows out of her face.
She spreads snowy egret wings and folds black legs and yellow feet
behind her as she soars into fierce winds.

The pack howls and runs in mad circles away from the circle of trees,
the egret flying,
the ponderosa growing out of stone.

Originally published in Gallup Journey, January 5, 2011

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August 7, 2011 · 7:31 pm

Moonpie at the Old School Gallery on a Saturday Night in July

Thomas Davis

“This is a band,” John Pickens said, pointing at the drummer, two women vocalists, and a bass guitarist in a wheelchair below the stage.

When lightning sparked the drums
and songs drove hard as thunder through the small, old school,
young and old women sparked alive
into a place where
black boars dance
and elk begin to trumpet at the moon,

and in their wake their men,
like sock-eyed salmon in the fall,
swam upstream to the place
where life flies in the thump of feet
on wooden floors
and everyday becomes a night
where oceans bigger than the earth
fill up a black hole’s maw
and spirits dance
and sing
with voices driven by the drums
and guitar licks

into a shine of eyes
looking back into the eyes
finding, renewing, confirming who each one of us is
inside our deepest love.

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June 27, 2011 · 3:13 am

Jeremiah: A Poem

a prose poem by Thomas Davis

5 – 7 – 5 [ the Haiku ]
June 14, 2012

Initiated,
the haiku is like an egg,
inseminated.

by Jim Kleinhenz

Jeremiah was a rooster. He was also a poet and the handsomest, best fighting rooster in the hen yard. His comb was as red as a fire blazing in the darkest of night. He had shiny green neck, brown back, yellow and burnished red wing, and black and brown tail feathers. His beak was as yellow as banana skins, and when he strutted he was a rooster possessed. All and all, he was one of the smartest, handsomest, fightingest, most beautiful roosters who had ever lived.

Normally Jeremiah, like all hens and roosters, was a creature of habit. Every morning he got up at dawn with other roosters and serenaded the rising sun to wake up the farmyard. Then he flapped to the ground, pecked around searching for a kernel of corn or chicken feed, and started his daily routine of romancing hens, fighting roosters, and parading around so that all who knew the value of roosters could see just what kind of rooster he was.

Normally Jeremiah, in spite of being a poet, had little time for reflection. From the time he got up with other roosters in the morning until he perched in the henhouse beside a bevy of his favorite hens on the pine wood roosting shelves before sleep, he kept moving. He scratched, bobbed his head, clucked, cackled, or crowed, depending on the situation, romanced hens, and generally kept himself busy with the important minutiae of life. But then, one evening, after dilly dallying with Mrs. Henspeck for one whole afternoon, soaking up spring’s early heat, puffing out chest feathers, and jumping ten feet into the air flapping his wings, he had an inspiration for a poem.

He failed to contain himself once revelation exploded in his head. He announced he had just had an inspiration for a poem to the entire hen yard and allowed himself to flap around in outrage when Wilber Snideboss huumphed and bobbed his head and remarked that he, for one, would believe Jeremiah was a poet when he stopped talking about poetry all the time and actually said a poem. To say that Jeremiah’s sense of himself was badly damaged would be an overstatement, but then again, what would you expect a rooster like Jeremiah to feel at such insensitive understanding of the poet’s craft? The truth is, after a little more dilly dallying with Mrs. Henspeck and yet another moment of squawking ecstasy, he slept all night without a worry in his head. He really was a poet, after all.

The next morning he was off his roost looking at the small upside-down-bowl-shaped hills east of the farm before the first gray tinges of morning were in the sky. When he had calculated there was enough light for everyone to see his feathers, he jumped off his perch and flapped his wings as proud as old Ben Peacock who lived north of the chicken yard beside the duck pond ringed by cattails and willow trees.

“Cock a doodle do!” he crowed.

Mrs. Henspeck, feeling the empty space beside her on the perch, popped open her large brown eyes and cackled. Fifteen hens fell off their roosts from the surprise of it all. The rest of the brood woke up, but clucked and shook their heads, convinced that Jeremiah had finally given up the ghost and descended into imbecility. All except for Mrs. Sleepeye, of course. She opened one eye, saw it was still dark, and wisely went back to sleep, determined not to interrupt her very satisfactory life just because Jeremiah had a strange wobble when he bobbed his head.

“What’s the meaning of this outrage?” Mrs. Leadbottom, the hen house’s most glorious self-appointed leader demanded. “Dawn is not here. Rooster-time has not come yet!”

Jeremiah preened feathers, somersaulted over backwards, flipping one wing out to make him swerve just before he landed, and then, with humility, puffed his chest.

“I have a poem to tell,” he said simply.

Immediately thirty of his favorite hens, led by Mrs. Henspeck, flapped off their roosts, if they weren’t already sitting dazed on the hen house floor, and clustered around him, brown eyes growing even browner, feathers all aflutter from excitement. They had all laid Jeremiah inspired eggs. They had always known he was a poet. He’d told them so on many an occasion. Jeremiah looked impatiently as Mrs. Leadbottom and scratched the grainy floor.

“Well?” he asked.

Jeremiah’s favorites turned to Mrs. Leadbottom and stared at her. Mrs. Leadbottom turned her head and pecked Mrs. Sleepeye on her wing. Mrs. Sleepeye opened both eyes and looked around as if she’d accidentally got lost in a henhouse she’d never seen before. Mrs. Leadbottom flapped elegantly off her roost, and, with the whole henhouse, followed Jeremiah outside.

Once outside Jeremiah glanced quickly at huddling eastern hills, then fanned out his huge audience in a circle around him by leaping in the air three times in succession and landing at a different spot each time. Wilber Snideboss, who, during good weather, always slept on the post where he led the roosters in their morning crow, swooped to the ground mad as a wet hen.

“What’s going on?” he demanded. “The hens are going to catch cold. It’s too early for them to be outside. We haven’t crowed the sun up yet!”

Jeremiah blinked toward the east again and strained his neck importantly. He was a beautiful rooster. Light from the sun that blazed still unseen behind the darkness of eastern hills was just beginning to add the sky’s first hints of blue.

“I have a poem to tell,” he said grandly. “An eastern poem. It is one of the most stupendous, original, beautiful, wonderful, magnificent poems ever spoken in this humble, plain, simple, livable, ordinary henyard!”

The hens, even Mrs. Leadbottom and Mrs. Sleepeye, gasped. “What words!” they thought to themselves. “What incredible depths of meaning!”

Wilber Snideboss was beaten, and he knew it. Maybe the braggart was a poet after all. He looked at the other roosters and saw darkness in their eyes. They were stunned. A rooster poet? Who would have dreamed it was possible?

Jeremiah flapped his wings, soared twenty feet straight up in the air, and landed in a long, swooping arc, scattering hens even as they gasped in admiration. Then he twirled around on one leg, flashed beautiful wings from his sides, and snapped them back into his body with military precision. When he stopped twirling, he pecked magnificently at empty air.

“Poetry,” he grandly told the other birds. “Is the most ancient art mastered by chickens. There is no greater art known to the henyard. Laying an egg is a beautiful, pure thing to do.” The hens all sighed. “But a poem is high drama and beauty all wrapped into a single moment that will be remembered forever.”

He glanced nervously to the East. Light was flooding the sky. The day was going to be glorious with high cirrus clouds and sky the color of blue robin eggs. He could just make out the outlines of pine and ponderosa on the distant hills. The world was awash in the fresh barnyard smell of spring.

“Okay, okay, enough of the show,” Mrs. Leadbottom said impatiently. “We’ve seen that. What’s the poem? It’s almost time for the roosters to crow.”

Wilber flapped over to where the henhouse leader was and nestled insinuatingly against her black and white feathers. Maybe this would work out okay after all.

Jeremiah ignored Mrs. Leadbottom, scratched the ground, crowed his high spirits, and went spiraling into the air again. He hovered for a moment above his audience as the hens, with the exception of Mrs. Leadbottom, gasped. He drifted to earth.

“Are there any questions?” he asked as his feet touched the ground.

“I’ve never seen such a poem,” Mrs. Henspeck sighed.

The hens cackled appreciatively, filling the morning air with their voices. Jeremiah puffed his chest again and scratched himself around in a circle. He quick-sneaked a look east again. Dawn was now lining the hills with fire. The horizon shimmered with coming day. Jeremiah strutted toward the split rail fence where Wilber Snideboss spent his nights. Mrs. Leadbottom snorted as Jeremiah’s tail feathers weaved back and forth with his importance. Wilber gave her a loving peck on the neck. Jeremiah leaped to Wilber’s favorite crowing post and turned proudly to his audience.

“My poem,” he announced.

The henyard was silent as hens and roosters strained to catch each word. Jeremiah preened feathers and puffed out his beautiful chest again.

“The sun also rises!” he trumpeted, his voice as silver as the sound of church bells that rang over the farm on Sunday mornings.

And behind him, over the humps of the green hills, burning red with morning, the sun rose into the blue sky.

Wilber Snideboss, startled, jumped from Mrs. Leadbottom onto the fence beside Jeremiah and crowed at the top of his shrill voice. Other roosters flapped behind Wilber’s lead and crowed even before they had reached their usual perches. Jeremiah crowed again as other roosters from other farms joined the chorus. All over the farm farm animals and the farm family got up from their stalls, pens, and beds and began moving around.

Jeremiah crowed again just for the sheer exhilaration of it. Then he flapped down into the henyard to be mobbed by admiring, cackling hens.

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