Dead Birds
I think of Lynyrd Skynyrd
With all their little boy names.
Ronnie, Billy, Artie, what
Hardscrabble hit licks like ax
In oak, famous for
Discourteous whickering,
For stomping on Jagger’s tongue,
For unbecoming without
Their boss man’s whipping voice,
No one to hold the kite string
In the storm sky when they die.
About the Author: A past winner of the Jim Harrison Award for contributions to baseball literature, Tim Peeler has also twice been a Casey Award Finalist (baseball book of the year) and a finalist for the SIBA Award. He lives with his wife, Penny in Hickory, North Carolina, where he directs the academic assistance programs at Catawba Valley Community College. He has published close to a thousand poems, stories, essays, and reviews in magazines, journals, and anthologies and has written sixteen books and three chapbooks. He has five books in the permanent collection at the Baseball Hall of Fame Library in Cooperstown, NY. His recent books include Rough Beast, an Appalachian verse novel about a southern gangster named Larry Ledbetter, Henry River: An American Ruin, poems about an abandoned mill town and film site for The Hunger Games, and Wild in the Strike Zone: Baseball Poems, his third volume of baseball-related poems.
Image Credit: Anonymous Wasservogel (Water Bird) (1910–12) Public domain image courtesy of Artvee
As It Ought To Be 