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“The Darkest Hour” by David Yezzi in the New York Times

By Ernest Hilbert • February 14, 2011 • Poetry

Note, this is the correct stanza structure and spacing, unlike what you’ll find at the Times.

She’s the trunk and they’re the blowing branches:
the seagulls mass around her as she scatters
bread crusts grabbed from a plastic grocery bag.
They dip to her, since bread is all that matters.

She casts the crumbs in lamplight, over water,
to gulls who catch her manna on the wing—
snatching their staple needs straight from the air,
the sky replete with every wanted thing,

until it seems that they might live off giving.
Back in her bag, her right hand burrows in
and finds a further hunk of loaf and chucks it
into the glinting sleet. The cries begin,

and, without fail, bread finds another mouth.
After she goes, the dark birds settle back.
They float south with the floes along the bank,
their fortune pitched in wind, the water black.


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    "The Retired Literary Critic Pauses in his Sunday Reading" by Ernest Hilbert

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    ernest@everseradio.com'

    Ernest Hilbert

    Ernest Hilbert is founder of E-Verse Radio.

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