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GAMECOCK Fear, jealousy and murder are the same When they put on their long reddish feathers, Their shawl neck and moccasin head In a tree bearing levels of women. There is yet no thread Of light, and his scabbed feet tighten, Holding sleep as though it were lockjaw, His feathers damp, his eyes crazed And cracked like the eyes Of a chicken head cut off or wrung-necked While he waits for the sun's only cry All night building up in his throat To leap out and turn the day red, To tumble his hens from the pine tree, And then will go down, his hackles Up, looking everywhere for the other Cock who could not be there, Head ruffed and sullenly stepping As upon his best human-curved steel: He is like any fierce Old man in a terminal ward: There is the same look of waiting That the sun prepares itself for; The enraged, survivinganother -day blood, And from him at dawn comes the same Cry that the world cannot stop. In all the great building's blue windows The sun gains strength; on all floors, women Awaken—wives, nurses, sisters and daughters220 And he lies back, his eyes filmed, unappeased, As all of them, clucking, pillow-patting, Come to help his best savagery blaze, doomed, deadgame , demanding, unreasonably Battling to the death for what is his. Buckdancer's Choice 221 ...

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