"Circus City" by Carol Frost

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend August 24, 2017   Circus City   Carol Frost

This is what life is really like. This is what life is really like. This is what life is really like every day.    —Gray Parrot, Vienna, 1943. In the circus animals' diary: "And all this was destroyed in ninety                minutes." Makeshift forests flaming to high heavens, metal bent bars. Siberian tigers, black panthers, jaguars, pumas, bears, hyenas and wolves, and all the lion pit saved from burning by the keepers' own hands. By bullets. Only so much can be said. Herbage will be scarce. Nature will gather like sleeping poppies over the craters and lost species. The African wart-hog will be cooked over an open fire in the garden. One thinks of one's restlessness, Faustian— in the minutes-before-dawn dark with the devil cry of black crows, the miry skull of the half-eaten rabbit, then gold grimy hills and light-making jewels and hand mirrors among the trees. Why are you here? It dawns. All this will never be again. The circus can't be locked.            Copyright © 2017 Carol Frost. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   "The Hamburg zoo and the Vienna circus were bombed in World War II. After one raid, the circus's gray parrot was found in an empty rain barrel, frightened and repeating the phrase, 'This is what life is really like.' Reading about it, I thought, if the gray parrot's inclination was political, mine would be, too. The poem became the center of a group of city poems I've been working on for several years." —Carol Frost   Carol Frost is the author of Entwined: Three Lyric Sequences (Tupelo Press, 2014). She teaches at Rollins College and lives in Florida. Poetry by Frost   Entwined: Three Lyric Sequences (Tupelo Press, 2014) "Yellow Beak" by Stephen Dobyns "there are these old fires" by Kaia Sand "C'est La Guerre" by Danniel Schoonebeek Help Support Poem-a-Day   If you value Poem-a-Day, please consider a monthly donation or one-time gift to help make it possible. Poem-a-Day is the only digital series publishing new, previously unpublished work by today's poets each weekday morning. The free series, which also features a curated selection of classic poems on weekends, reaches 450,000+ readers daily. Thank you! Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038