MACABRE IN MACAWS

After the hurricane of the late forties,

Peter Polite says, in the live-oak trees

Were weird, macabre macaws

And ash-colored cockatoos, blown overseas

From Nassau and the West Indies.

These hopped about like dead men's thoughts

Among the draggled Spanish moss,

Preening themselves, all at a loss,

Preening faint caws,

And shrieking from nostalgia —

With dull screams like a child

Born with neuralgia —

And this seems true to me,

Fitting the landscape's drab grotesquery.