Poets answer an age-old question: Why did the chicken cross the road? 11. Seamus Heaney

Poets answer an age-old question: Why did the chicken cross the road?

Seamus Heaney:

Husbandry says “Stay safe
on this side of the street.”
But once in a while
a chicken will rise to her feet
(if she’s not met defeat)
and see that the other side
is reachable from here.
Now she comes near.

[Click here to read an excerpt from The Cure at Troy by Seamus Heaney]

Poets answer an age-old question: Why did the chicken cross the road? Part 9: Edgar Allan Poe

 

 

Why, I wonder, do you reckon that this bird would come here pecking?
What strange sound incited her to pick the henhouse lock?
Did she cross for country, hip-hop, bluegrass, jazz, or rock?
Quoth the chicken: “Bach.”

Poets Answer an Age-Old Question: Leonard Cohen on why the chicken crossed the road

Q: Why did the chicken cross the road?

LEONARD COHEN:
I saw you on the other side
And crossed the road—it wasn’t wide,
But I’d’ve crossed a 6-lane highway to ya.
Cock-a-doodle-doodle-doo-yeah
Cock-a-doodle-doodle-doooo, yeah.

 

Happy birthday to Leonard Cohen, who would have been 86 today.

Poets answer an age-old question: Why did the chicken cross the road? Maya Angelou

Why did the chicken cross the road?

Maya Angelou:
You can put me in the barnyard
With your pigs and cows and ducks,
You can tell me I should stay there–
“I’ve got places to go,” I clucks.

Oddly, I can’t seem to find the musical rendition of “Still I Rise” that I’ve been hearing on the radio lately, but a search turned up this version.

 

Poets Answer an Age-Old Question (part 6)

Happy birthday to Theodore Roethke, who would have turned 112 on Monday, had it not been Memorial Day. Uh, I mean, had it not been for his untimely death in 1963. Except that, you know, a timely death would have caught up with him by now.

 

Poets answer an age-old question
Why did the chicken cross the road?

Theodore Roethke:
I cross the road, but take the crossing slow,
But don’t ask why—for now I do not know.
(I learn by going where I have to go.)

Poets answer an age-old question: Why did the chicken cross the road? (part 4)

 

Gil Scott-Heron

The chicken crossing will not be televised

It will not be sponsored by Colonel Sanders or

Brought to you by a contribution to your PBS station

From Chik-Fil-A

The chicken crossing will not be televised

(It might be on YouTube.)

  1. e. cummings

anychick lived in a pretty how coop

and str e  t   c    h     e      d

her chicken legs(white feathers

furled in the even

ing breeze)across

the sunset road because(pick peck)she

wanted(peck)to see

the

Capital(they didn’t

have those where she was from).

Poets Answer an Age-Old Question: Why did the chicken cross the road? (part 2)

Q: Why did the chicken cross the road?

Allen Ginsberg

I saw the best hens of my generation destroyed by butchers, roasted, rotisserie-basted,
wandering across the street at dawn looking for a bawdy cock.

 

Elizabeth Bishop

The art of crossing isn’t hard to master–
when asphalt’s hot, it helps if you cross faster.

Gertrude Stein

The road
is a road
is a road
is a road
to cross
like a boss
and eat moss.

 

Click here for part 1 (featuring Dickinson, Whitman, and Shakespeare).

Poets Answer an Age-Old Question: Why did the chicken cross the road? [Part 1]

Q: Why did the chicken cross the road?

A:

William Shakespeare

To cross or not to cross—that is the question!
Whether ‘tis nobler in the coop to suffer
The pecks and scratches of aggressive chickens
Or set foot upon a dusty roadway
And so, with your toes spread, cross it.

Walt Whitman

O chicken, my chicken
The fearful path is wide
But still you walked across the road
To reach the other side.

Emily Dickinson

Because I could not cross the road
A chicken crossed for me
And pecked the doorbell that would ring
Apartment number three.