The Cuckoo

Unpublished. The folk song "The Cuckoo" has a funny line, at least usually, there's a lot of variation, "she doesn't/sing 'cuckoo'/til the fourth day/of july" which hardly makes sense because cuckoos sing well before that and don't even live in the US. One thought is that this song, and another that shares the melody, "Old Stewball," which is usually about a favorite underdog horse that loses on the Fourth of July, somehow mixed with each other in the singing of them, and a different song emerged. Meanwhile, the Tom Waits song "Fish and Bird" came around my head, or maybe Peter Case's "Horse and Crow," anyway along with the thought about the perils of parenting teenagers. That's probably more analysis than this little piece can bear.

The Cuckoo

The riverstones dream of jagged lives,
sharp as switchblades and all their own making;
of striding across an overgrown field
and with a small shrug lay claim to a place. 

The visions that follow mix and merge:
travel and banditry range the thoughts of walls;
stone rings would dance and mock the limits
of human memory and imagination.

Like folk songs that wander into each other
and emerge with their threads crossed
and bound, once there was a cuckoo who sang
all summer long and a racehorse that won

every race. The two became friends and each
wanted most the life that could not be,
just like the stones in the stable around them,
just like the men who put their money down.

Stay with me the cuckoo sang. Run with me
the horse replied, and so the days went
until the cuckoo flew south and the horse
was returned to her winter pastures.

The first time I saw you I was a child,
and the last time I was too distracted 
to take full notice. My own children are
in high school and I tell them the one thing

I would say to all of them, to everyone
who was ever a teenager in America
is that you are loved unconditionally: you are
loved and not by some imaginary power

but by humans you know and do not yet,
and you need to be braver than you are
to take hold of all this love and make of it
one story, your own, both jagged and smooth.