And now I'm going to read end with two poems, that
are older poems.
My husband Bob, who is sitting there,
who taught me why the sky is blue and stuff like that.
It's nice to have science in the house,
it helps keep your feet on the ground.
But he said, boy, if you like songs,
you want to hear the song you like again, right?
Because you never.
Oh, I can't read that.
I read that before.
OK, I am now going to read to the old songs.
This one is kind of related to something
Margaree said about mercy.
The speaker of this poem is a wolf.
No ordinary wolf, but the legendary Lupercalia wolf,
who you probably know the story though, Roman myth.
The wolf who suckled the cast off twins Romulus and Remus.
Romulus was to be, of course, the founder of Rome.
The title of this poem is a broken off sentence
that the poem completes.
So, being as I was, how could I help?
Ellipsis.
It was the noise that drew me first.
Even before the scent, the long water
had brought something to my den, spilling its banks,
leaving the hollow pod of reeds in the cool mud.
Whatever it was, it cried inside,
and an odor rose from it.
Man smell, but sweeter.
Two small, hairless cubs were in it, pink as summer oleander,
waving the little worm like things they had instead of paws.
Naked like that, they made my blood go slow.
My dugs begin to drip.
I tipped the pod.
They slid into the ferns.
I nuzzled the howling pair.
They found my side.
They suckled there and drank their fill.
That night the red star in the sky was bright.
A vulture's eye that waits with a patience
that I hardly understand.
The twin cubs slept in their shining skin, warm at my side.
I dreamed the trees were falling one by one, a sound deafening.
The dust that rose from one a mist
to hide the felling of the next.
The mountains were cut into two, great stones
were rolled and piled like hills until the sky was shut.
Where the trees had grown, pillars of stone rose high.
The birds circled, but their skulls struck the sky.
Teeth to the earth, our den fell in like a rotted log
when weight is added to decay.
Nothing to eat, the cubs howled.
The flesh fell from our bones.
We ran under a strange sky whose light was wrong.
It rose from the city walls, bounced off
the leaden heaven flat as the sound of a stone striking mud.
One of the brothers killed the other.
Blood poured where the streams had run.
Nowhere to drink, we slink from one rock to the next.
Hunger drives us to the walls where sharp as the eyes of men
death waits with its 1,000 iron thorns.
But the warm sun woke me, I forgot.
The twins were all I saw.
For days we laid together by the den.
The river ran beside us like a friend.
They drank and laughed at the morning light that played
in the shelter of the leaves.
Forgive me.
I was wolf and could not help the love
that flowed from me to them.
The thin sweet river of milk.
Even now, though the world has come to match the dream,
I think, I would give it again.
[APPLAUSE]