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.
It’s National Poetry Month, where prayer sometimes wears the camouflage of poem. According to today’s poet, Todd Davis, “April Prayer” is an attempt to understand and represent the complicated act of feeding oneself from the woods…while honoring the lives of both the predators and their prey.”
Todd Davis is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently Ditch Memory: New & Selected Poems. For the past 22 years, he’s lived along the Allegheny Front between the villages of Tipton and Bellwood. He teaches environmental studies at Penn State Altoona.
If he’s not teaching, reading, or writing, where’s the best place to find Todd Davis? Try the “41,000 acres of game lands to the west of [his] house.” The poet explains, “I hunt and fish and forage for wild edibles in these woods…. While I mourn the loss of the wolves and mountain lions …,I’m grateful for the coyote as a fellow predator who helps maintain a healthy forest ….When I hunt deer, I often think about the relationship between the coyote and myself. I deeply admire the beauty of deer. To take [a deer’s] life is…difficult. …It involves both gratitude and grief. Whenever I kill a deer, I offer a prayer for its life and the fact that it will sustain and feed my own life and that of my family.”
Here’s “April Prayer” by Todd Davis
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Where snow disappeared a month ago, I trace my fingers
to wake dirt. In darkness coyotes dragged the carcass
of the doe they’d run down into a tangle of rhododendron.
If I’m to pray, I must become the thing I pray to: flesh rent,
fur reformed into tufts of hair like the fans my aunts wave
under their chins in church. My lips scoured
by uninterrupted light, not a single tree leafed out.
Just words in empty air, for that deer
and those coyotes, for the beauty of the devoured
and the ones who devour.
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Published in Ditch Memory: New & Selected Poems (Michigan State University Press, 2024)
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That was “April Prayer” by Todd Davis. 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.
