• Skip to content
  • Skip to secondary navigation
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Painted Bride Quarterly

  • About
    • About PBQ
    • People
  • Issues
    • Current Issue
    • Past Issues
    • Print Annuals
  • Podcast
    • Latest Podcast
    • All Podcasts
  • News & Events
  • Submit
  • Shop
  • Fiction
  • Poetry
  • Prose
  • Contributors
  • Current Issue

Yusef Komunyakaa: Ode to a Squirrel

May 20, 2011 by PBQ

Good you can’t hear
The stories & jibes inside
My sleepy head, as someone
Jokes about squirrel pie

From four decades ago
Somewhere in Louisiana or Big
Thicket. Tonight, on the roof
Here in Princeton, you work

Around the clock. Early
October, back & forth
With a stash of acorns.
You tapdance on the gutter screen,

Shimmy up to the highest pitch
& overhang below a crescent moon,
& then one of those great leaps
For the same tortured branch.

Filed Under: Contributors 63, Issue 63, Poetry, Poetry 63 Tagged With: Contributors 63, Poetry, Poetry 63, Yusef Komunyakaa

Reader Interactions

Primary Sidebar

Recent News & Events

PBQ Poet’s Publishing Premier: Carlos Andrés Gómez’s Fractures

Issue 100 Has Arrived!

Temporarily Closing Submissions

PBQ presents: Slam Bam Reboot

Storytelling in a Box with Neil Bardhan at Writers Room

© 2020 Painted Bride Quarterly. Contact PBQ: info@pbqmag.org