Vox Populi
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Linda Blaskey: Two Poems
Sunrise Saturday Morning and a Neighbor Has Shot Our Barn Cats
I don’t know this for sure, but the cats haven’t arrived for breakfast.
I heard the shots. Paused in measuring out horse feed. Looked up.
I heard the shots and felt the cats rise. Like birds seeking thermals.
The air I take in feels thin, ragged, and rough against the walls of my lungs.
This neighbor to the south of us uses a .22 long rifle.
So does the neighbor to the north.
They both dislike cats. And fox. Take potshots at chipmunks.
They target shoot on weekend afternoons.
They shoot toward the woods. They shoot at trees.
There are houses on the other side of the woods, at the edge of the road.
About a quarter mile.
.22 long ammo can travel up to a mile if unimpeded.
.22s are recommended for plinking. And small game.
The air offers no resistance as I walk back to the house from the barn.
~~
Blue Adirondack Chairs Under the Maple Dying of Black Sap Disease
Its bark has split open, weeping syrup black and bacterial.
We worked like a colony of ants to save it;
mulched, watered, drove stakes of fertilizer
in a witches’ circle at its base, shaved the infected
burls from its trunk. Much like the dedication
of modern botanists and archeologists that plucked a seed,
from the 1st century CE, off a cave floor in Judea,
and planted it in sterile soil. Fourteen years later,
its leaves discovered to be a source of medicinal tsori,
but no flowering, no fruit, gender a mystery.
We sit in the chairs under our healed tree,
its wounds scarred over, canopy full, and watch
its samaras helicopter to the ground. Did you know
you can peel back the wings and eat the tiny seed inside?
~~~~~
Linda Blaskey’s publications include White Horses (Mojave River, 2019). She lives in southern Delaware with her husband on a small horse and goat farm.
Copyright 2025 Linda Blaskey
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Thank you, Linda, for these two incredible poems. “Sunrise” especially speaks to me — the pacing with those stand-alone lines, each its own stanza, deepens its impact. I also live in a place where we have such fears; thank you for putting them into words.
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Two fine poems with two different after-images…
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Yes, they are. The poems linger in my mind after I stop reading.
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I finished killing things in my life quite some time ago, it is, however, in my life—coyotes preying on calves, feral hogs, a neighbor who’s lost 6 calves to black vultures. We lose certain balance by our presence and the remedies are unbalanced. These artful poems of nature and mortality strike familiar chords.
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Thank you, Sean. Everything we do affects nature’s balance. We need to tread more carefully.
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Both poems heart-stopping, in different ways.
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Thanks, Donna. I agree. Linda is a new discovery for me. I like her work.
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Isn’t it lovely to discover poets new to one? That always makes me happy!
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Me too, Donna.
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I’m a Texan. Well-familiar with that .22 long rifle of which you speak. We used to be taught about the dangers of shooting in populated places or toward anywhere livestock may be. We lost horses to tiny infections from such bullets fired by unknown hooligans. Sadly, we’re barreling toward a new Wild West, and life itself has become unimportant to young hooligans with no understanding or desire to understand gun safety.
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There were many reasons I was glad to leave my home state. The gun crazies were among them.
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This gun culture is completely alien to me. I can only understand it intellectually. The second poem made me think of my childhood. We opened the ‘helicoptered’ pods, halved them, and stuck them to our noses, think this truly funny. Had no idea one could eat them.
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Somewhere in the memoir I wrote but never sent out is the story of the man we shared a campfire with and my mom stepping in front of his rifle when a majestic deer arrived ( he stopped in time)
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Your mom was a hero.
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Thanks for posting these intriguing glimpses of rural life, and its strange connectors. The rifle poem brings back too many sour memories. I once owned a .22 and fired long rifle bullets. Sadly I killed three creatures with it: a raccoon, a squirrel (though I ate that), and a fly. Then I gave it away. The coon tail became my dog’s favorite toy.
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Thanks, Jim. I grew up in the rural Texas gun culture. My first firearm was a .22 rifle which was given to me on my 13th birthday. I got pretty good at target practice, but couldn’t bring myself to kill anything. This reluctance frustrated my grandfather who stopped taking me deer hunting, a pity since I enjoyed those long weekends in the woods with him.
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I only went squirrel hunting once. But my dad once went deer hunting. He said it was a beautiful fall day, then suddenly a buck appeared. He aimed at it, hesitated, thought shooting it would destroy the beauty and symmetry of the day. So he lowered the rifle, and never hunted again. He told me to never tell that story to my gun-crazy uncle.
And the summer I worked on a dairy farm, the farm wife always blamed the neighbor Rossi’s cat for any signs of mischief around our farm. That barn cat was the scapegoat for many things it knew nothing about.
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