I sent this poem in a comment to Theresa today, but I love it SO much that I've decided to print it here as well. I remember the very first time I heard it read, some years ago. My favorite preacher ever in the world, Episcopalian priest Barbara Brown Taylor, used it in a sermon, and there was a catch in her usually exquisitely calm voice as she came to the end. I don't remember a thing about the sermon (sorry, Barbara), but I've never forgotten the poem's evocation of the unexpected beauty and mystery that we can choose to experience in lieu of revulsion and horror.
The Two-Headed Calf
by Laura Gilpin
Tomorrow when the farm boys find this
freak of nature they will wrap his body
in newspaper and carry him to the museum.
But tonight he is alive and in the north
field with his mother. It is a perfect
summer evening: the moon rising over
the orchard, the wind in the grass. And
as he stares into the sky, there are
twice as many stars as usual.
6 comments:
This is the most beautiful poem - "twice as many stars as usual." How exquisite. I love it - thank you for sharing.
Vicky
My Incentive http://www.livejournal.com/~vxv789/14498.html
Wow! Lisa :-]
evocation of the unexpected beauty and mystery that we can choose to experience in lieu of revulsion and horror.
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Perfect description. Joseph Campbell calls this the experience of the sublime.
just "a catch in her voice?" i couldn't possibly read this poem aloud without bursting into tears. how exquisitely lovely, how heartbreaking, how full of mystery and beauty indeed. thank you, my dear, for posting this. a thousand thank you's. it is a meditation.
How poignant...yet it still makes me sad,somehow.
This is a wonderful poem. I've actually seen a two headed calf. There is one at the local museum. Do you remember the baby last year that they were calling two-headed? They tried to amputate the extra head and she/they died. I saw the picture of her and she was so pretty. It made me sad that everyone focused on what was wrong with her. I a cried over the extra head, too. It was just a partial head, and yet it moved it's mouth in sucking motions when the mother breastfed them. I know she loved her mother, too.
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