I'd like to thank Janet for initiating this thread. I think we've moved up a long way from Murray! Mark, the poem is Father and Child, my favorite Harwood poem (well, it's trimeter, and damn fine trimeter at that.) Here is the first section:
The Barn Owl
Daybreak: the household slept.
I rose, blessed by the sun.
A horny fiend, I crept
out with my father's gun.
Let him dream of a child
obedient, angel-mild--
old No-Sayer, robbed of power
by sleep. I knew my prize
who swooped home at this hour
with daylight-riddled eyes
to his place on a high beam
in our old stables, to dream
light's useless time away.
I stood, holding my breath,
in urine-scented hay,
master of life and death,
a wisp-haired judge whose law
would punish beak and claw.
My first shot struck. He swayed,
ruined, beating his only
wing, as I watched, afraid
by the fallen gun, a lonely
child who believed death clean
and final, not this obscene
bundle of stuff that dropped,
and dribbled through loose straw
tangling in bowels, and hopped
blindly closer. I saw
those eyes that did not see
mirror my cruelty
while the wrecked thing that could
not bear the light nor hide
hobbled in its own blood.
My father reached my side,
gave me the fallen gun.
"End what you have begun."
I fired. The blank eyes shone
once into mine and slept.
I leaned my head upon
my father's arm and wept,
owl-blind in early sun
for what I had begun.
When I first crawled out from under my rock to realize there was more than Wilbur, Tim Steele sent me some very hard-to-find books. Helen Trimpi, Suzanne Doyle, Dick Davis, and Gwen Harwood's Collected from Oxford, which is probably still in print. All wonderful, masterful poets.
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