Thanks, Alicia, for posting “Egrets,” a favorite I meant to include in Julie’s selection. The excerpt,
and chances are it’s
not the great or snowy type,
nearly wiped out by
hat plume hunters in
the nineteenth century...
makes me want to post a poem published in Mezzo Cammin, Vol. 1, Issue 2, by DOLORES HAYDEN:
AUDUBONNET
--In 1896 Harriet Lawrence Hemenway co-founded the Massachusetts
Audubon Society to stop the killing of birds to decorate women's hats.
She's worn aigrettes, admired how prettily
the snowy egrets' mating feathers curve
to frame a woman's face, and yet she knows
plume hunters leave the egrets' chicks to starve,
she's seen the bloody nests and bloody grass
where Southern feather merchants deal out death
as easily as deal a hand of cards.
She spies a roseate tern, the twentieth
today, found counting hats on Newbury Street,
numbering Boston ladies who all tread
past plate glass windows flaunting their dead birds.
Just thirty-nine and bored at home, she's read
that Modern Woman can uplift the Race
but females here boast ignorant displays--
bonnets where saw-whet owls lay eggs on straw,
chapeaux where robins light with squawking jays.
Loathing the taxidermists' bright-eyed art,
she spots a Greater Bird of Paradise,
wonders about new money--streetcar fortune?--
strutting this carcass, scarce at any price.
She's birding for her sanity today,
scanning each head with a flightless landscape on it,
marking the wings and tails. Friends drink her tea,
she snips and sews, designs a birdless bonnet,
she shames ten million preening under claws
and topples feather merchants, fashions laws.
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