This is poetry moment on WPSU – a weekly program featuring the work of contemporary Pennsylvania poets. Your host is poet and author Marjorie Maddox, a 2023 Monson Arts Fellow, author of more than 20 books, and Professor Emerita of English and Creative Writing at the Lock Haven campus of Commonwealth University.
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Welcome to Poetry Moment.
In today’s poem, “Four Turkeys,” Daniel Donaghy does not describe a roasted turkey surrounded by mashed potatoes and pumpkin pie. In fact, the poem doesn’t take place in November. Instead, we watch in early spring as four turkeys feast at the poet’s bird feeder. There is no hunting rifle
—only a photo shoot and plenty of turkey trivia.
Daniel Donaghy is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Somerset, Paterson Poetry Prize winner. He grew up in Philadelphia, and earned a BA in English at Kutztown University, where he began a decades-long friendship with esteemed PA poet Harry Humes. Donaghy is a Professor of English and the 2023 University Distinguished Professor at Eastern Connecticut State University. Still, he will always consider Pennsylvania his home.
Daniel Donaghy dedicates his poem “Four Turkeys” to esteemed Pennsylvania poet and Kutztown University Professor Emeritus Harry Humes. Donaghy explains, “Harry. . . taught me through his poems and in our many conversations to appreciate the splendor and wonder of the natural world.” Listen and give thanks.
Here’s “Four Turkeys” by Daniel Donaghy
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Second day of spring, I woke
to four wild turkeys gobbling on
cracked shells below our feeders.
They brought no chaos to the morning:
bright blue over the mountains,
wrens picking suet as they always do
and flying off, finches pulling thistle
through socks, cardinals swooping
back and forth for sunflower seeds.
Each turkey a good twelve pounds
and almost tall as my waist,
same height as my daughter, who’s five,
who loved to hear about them after school:
animals from her Little House books
feasting right here in our yard.
Another of her books taught us
turkeys can fly fifty miles an hour,
glide thousands of feet without flapping,
scratch through six inches of ice
to lift scraps of midwinter food.
All instinct and shifts through resistance.
All blood ritual and desire.
Their eyes can see for a hundred yards.
Their call can resound a mile off.
These turkeys, though, are for the moment
plain as pigeons, or plain as any of us
who have wandered far off course
and want only enough of a meal
to keep going toward what we know.
They eat slowly and don’t fuss.
They don’t strut their feathers
or drag their wings on the ground.
They don’t scare the squirrel
or woodpecker or red-winged blackbirds.
They lean into one another,
pay no attention to me at our window
as I snap their picture again and again,
zooming my camera in, zooming out.
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"Four Turkeys" was first published under a different title in Valparaiso Poetry Review, Volume VIII, Number 2 (2007) and reprinted in the anthology Waking Up to the Earth: Connecticut Poets in a Time of Global Climate Crisis, edited by Margaret Gibson (Grayson Books, 2021).
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That was “Four Turkeys” by Daniel Donaghy. Thanks for listening.
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Listen for Poetry Moment with Marjorie Maddox Mondays during Morning Edition and All Things Considered on WPSU. You can more episodes at wpsu.org/poetrymoment.
Our theme music is by Eric Ian Farmer.
