Here at Black Lawrence Press we are celebrating National Poetry Month with a poem a day, featuring a total of 30 authors from our list. Today’s featured poet is Keith Taylor, author of Marginalia for a Natural History.
The Last Roost
There’s a record written years later:
up in Emmett County, after years
of slaughter–50,000 a day
sent to Chicago–the passenger
pigeons rose in their last flock, circled
over Lake Michigan, terrified
of land, and finally exhausted
rested, relieved perhaps, in water.
(From Marginalia, and, in 2014, lamenting the 100th anniversary of the extinction of the Passenger Pigeon)
Keith Taylor has published some 14 books or chapbooks, translations or co-edited volumes, including Marginalia for a Natural History with Black Lawrence (2011). Among other jobs he is Associate Editor of Michigan Quarterly Review.
