Macabre In Macaws

After the hurricane of the late forties, Peter Polite says, in the live-oak trees Were weird, macabre macaws And ash-colored cockatoos, blown overseas From Nassau and the West Indies. These hopped about like dead men's thoughts Among the draggled Spanish moss, Preening themselves, all at a loss, Preening faint caws, And shrieking from nostalgia-- With dull screams like a child Born with neuralgia-- And this seems true to me, Fitting the landscape's drab grotesquery.

H.A.