Tag: duck hunting

  • Feet stuck in the muck and eyes trained to the sky

    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.