This morning it is minus six degrees.
The old woman at the corner with her bundles
says yes to a ride, but is, at first, unwilling
to say where. Then she does say and tells me
as a girl her grandmother kept three hundred chickens
which she tended every morning before school.
She says a Chinese man would come to separate
the roosters from the hens. Apparently they look alike.
In storybooks there’s no mistaking, but it seems
in real life, one must be outed by his crow.
Surely fitting, after all it is a rooster crows our sins,
trumpets saints’ betrayals, sounding out iniquities
cocks punctuate to waken dawn. Any softer sound
would only drown, damp down, not provoke contrition.
God made birds squawky, fractious, on the fifth day
of the world, right after separating light from dark.
He knew no flashing light, no blackened night
would fright a Peter’s sin. No lowing of fat cows,
no serpent hiss would do.
Teach the Apostle Peter how to count to three.
It takes a rooster; one who reads the sky and struts,
likes hens (a lot), rules the roost, and splits the night
with cock-a-doodle-doos and news that day is well
and truly on its way, night’s adding up of sins soon
to be done away, or, at the very least, be sounded.
The old woman says to drop her just beyond the hedge,
pointing to a shambly shed that hugs the alleyway.
“There’s no explaining roosters,” she says to me,
“I wish my heater wasn’t broke today.”
She opens up the door, she clambers out. I drive away.
Home to my ten-room house, every corner warm and dry.
Nobody ever hears the first cock cry.
Linda McCullough Moore, winner of a Pushcart Prize, is author of four books and hundreds of shorter works. She mentors writers and is completing a novel and a collection of her poetry.
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