Your Sunday Poem

This fiercely unblinking poem is by Ellen Bryant Voigt, from her new book: Messenger: New and Selected Poems, 1976-2006

THE HEN

The neck lodged under a stick,
the stick under her foot,
she held the full white breast
with both hands, yanked up and
out,
and the head was delivered of the
body.
Brain stuck like a lens; the profile
fringed with red feathers.
Deposed, abstracted,
the head lay on the ground like a
coin.
But the rest, released into the
yard,
language and direction wrung
from it,
flapped the insufficient wings
and staggered forward, convulsed,
instinctive –
I thought it was sobbing to see it
hump the dust,
pulsing out those muddy juices,
as if something deep in the
gizzard,
in the sack of soft nuggets,
drove it toward the amputated
member.
Even then, watching it litter the
ground
with snowy refusals, I knew it was
this
that held life, gave life
and not the head with its hard
contemplative eye.