- ken69
- Norfolk UK
- 23 Nov 2004
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405
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Good thinking, Miranda...and another marketing scheme would be to enclose a card...aka cigarette cards of years ago...with pictures of birds,,collect this series...encourage peeps to buy another loada bird food...with factual notes notes on the back .....or a poem such as.........
From the Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke
by Theodore Roethke,
Doubleday & Company, Inc., Garden City, New York, 1966
(Used without permission)
How I loved one like you when I was little!-
With his stripes of silver and his small house on his back,
Making a slow journey around the well-curb.
I longed to be like him, and was,
In my way, close cousin
To the dirt, my knees scrubbing
The gravel, my nose wetter than his.
When I slip, just slightly, in the dark,
I know it isn't a wet leaf,
But you, loose toe from the old life,
The cold slime come into being,
A fat, five-inch appendage
Creeping slowly over the wet grass,
Eating the heart out of my garden.
And you refuse to die decently!-
Flying upward through the knives of my lawnmower
Like pieces of smoked eel or raw oyster,
And I go faster in my rage to get done with it,
Until I'm scraping and scratching at you, on the doormat,
The small dead pieces sticking under an instep;
Or, poisoned, dragged a white skein of spittle over a path-
Beautiful, in its way, like quicksilver-
You shrink to something less,
A rain-drenched fly or spider.
I'm sure I've been a toad, one time or another.
With bats, weasels, worms-I rejoice in the kinship.
Even the caterpillar I can love, and the various vermin.
But as for you, most odious-
Would Blake call you holy?
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