English flagItalian flagKorean flagChinese (Simplified) flagPortuguese flagGerman flagFrench flag
Spanish flagJapanese flagArabic flagRussian flagGreek flagDutch flagBulgarian flag
Czech flagCroatian flagDanish flagFinnish flagHindi flagPolish flagRomanian flag
Swedish flagNorwegian flagThai flag    
By N2H
Welcome to Raph Koster's personal website: MMOs, gaming, writing, art, music, books.

The Sunday Poem: Scavenger Crow

July 2nd, 2006

His claws and beak, tools of hunger, classify
Kernels on a tree powdered into gold.
I wish I did not recognize myself in him.
Where is his murder? He marks his boundaries,
Removing wood from corn, placing corn
In gullet, no flock beyond the sky and caw
Of hunger. A metal thing, he is,
Ball-bearing eyes and hammered feathers
Rusting away. He sorts to understand,
Desperately separating grains from wood grain,
A glutton wasting half his food.

This is a poem about analysis, I think, about the impulse to understand, and about what we lose and gain in the process. Mostly lose, in this case.

*

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “The Sunday Poem: Scavenger Crow”

Jump to reader comments » | Leave a reply »

Trackbacks & Pingbacks
Reader Comments
  1. Amaranthar said on

    Don’t we “mostly lose” most of the time? Isn’t it those few who see the “wood” for it’s potential the one’s we call innovative? Are they not something different from the ones made of metal, robotic, rusting?

  2. Buzzorkny said on

    Wow. Unbelievably bad. You should set that to some of your music; then you’d have horrible poetry set to awful music. A seemingly invincible combination.

  3. Yehuda Berlinger said on

    Raph,

    Lord, what fools these mortals be! Ignore these scoffers, Raph. I found it interesting. “Where is his murder?” is a striking phrase.

    Yehuda

Meta

Recent Comments

Categories

Tags

Recent Trackbacks

Archives



A Theory of Fun
for Game Design

Book cover for A Theory of Fun for Game Design, by Raph Koster

Press
Excerpts

Buy from Amazon

Twitter @raphkoster


The whole Web

Raph's Website

See popular posts »
About the blog »



After the Flood

After the Flood CD Cover

Available on CD
$14.99


More stuff to buy

Mohawk Penguin T-Shirt

Mohawk Penguin
Ash Grey T-Shirt

$16.99


Receive CafePress Updates!

LegendMUD

click here to visit the Legend website

"The world the way they thought it was..."


Get Firefox