Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

Harriet Monroe, ed. (1860–1936). The New Poetry: An Anthology. 1917.

Macabre in Macaws

Hervey Allen

AFTER the hurricane of the late forties,

Peter Polite says, in the live-oak trees

Were weird macabre macaws,

And ash-colored cockatoos blown overseas

From Nassau and the West Indies.

These hopped about like dead men’s thoughts

Amid the draggled Spanish moss,

Preening themselves, all at a loss;

Mewing faint caws,

And shrieking with nostalgia—

With dull screams like a child

Born with neuralgia.

And this seems true to me,

Fitting the landscape’s drab grotesquery.