I’d never heard of the poet Timothy Murphy until reading about him in the Prufrock newsletter that mentioned him after his passing. He specialized in poetry about hunting, something I’ve accumulated an amateur’s worth of experience in over the years. Intrigued, I checked out his book of poetry Hunter’s Log: Field Notes, 1988-2011 from the library and stumbled upon the following poem “The Blind”, which I found to be a beautifully bittersweet evocation of duck hunting.
The Blind
Gunners a decade dead
wing through my father’s mind
as he limps out to the blind
bundled against the wind.
By some ancestral code
fathers and sons don’t break,
we each carry a load
of which we cannot speak.
Here we commit our dead
to the unyielding land
where broken windmills creak
and stricken ganders cry.
Father, the dog, and I
are learning how to die
with our feet stuck in the muck
and our eyes trained to the sky.