Old Masters
Given a blackbird in a mountain scene, all in all it's head will twitch before its eye, should it wish to see, unless it is imagined. One must infrequently or never lift a wheelbarrow's load to think one so depended upon would be left out in a rainy chicken yard. But perhaps, if you're still by an old pond, you might just hear a frog's gentle plop.
Three famous poems inspired this one (four if you count the title): Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird by Wallace Stevens, The Red Wheelbarrow by William Carlos Williams, Matsuo Basho’s famous frog pond haiku, and Musée des Beaux Arts by W.H. Auden. Living on the farm is a constant reminder of what is practical and what is real. Sometimes I fret that we artists and poets living in our human worlds that are one or many steps away from that reality tend to forget it or misrepresent it. That is what this poem is about.