Passing
a Truck Full of Chickens at Night on Highway Eighty
by Jane Mead
This is Michael Carey for Voices from the Prairie a weekly sampling from the rich soil of Iowa’s literary tradition. Today’s author is Jane Mead a young woman currently teaching at Wake Forest University but who returns every summer and every chance she can get to her rural home outside Hills near Iowa City. Her poem for us today is "Passing a Truck of Chickens at Night on Highway Eighty." Everyone who has done much driving on Route 80 in Iowa has, at some time or another, seen a big silver trailer stuffed full of pigs or cows or turkeys or chickens headed to slaughter, their smell and maybe their feathers flying around in the wind. But not many of us, I would wager, have considered it a beautiful and powerful occasion for a poem as Jane Mead does in this one.
Passing a Truck Full of Chickens at Night on Highway Eighty
What struck me at first
was their panic.
Some were pulled by the wind from moving
to the ends of the stacked cages,
some had their heads blown through the bars –
and could not get them
in again.
Some hung there like that -- dead –
their own feathers blowing, clotting
in their faces. Then
I saw the one that made me slow some –
I lingered there beside her for five miles.
She had pushed her head
through the space
between the bars – to get a better view.
She had the look of a dog in the back
of a pickup, that eager
look of a dog
who knows she’s being taken along.
She craned her neck.
She looked around, watched
me, then
strained to see over the car – strained
to see what happened beyond.
That is the chicken
I want to be.
"Passing a Truck
Full of Chickens at Night on Highway Eighty" by Jane Mead from her book
The Lord and the General Din of the World published by Sarabande Books.
For Voices from the Prairie and Humanities Iowa, this is Michael Carey hoping you continue to hear the music blooming all around you.
Biography
Jane Mead teaches at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival and lives in the summers at her home in Hills. During the school year, she is Poet-in-Residence at Wake Forest University. She is a recipient of a Whibury Writer’s Award and a Competition grant from the Lannan Foundation. Her work has been featured in many of this nation’s top magazines and newspapers including American Poetry Review, The New York Times and The Washington Post. Her first book of poetry, The Lord and the General Din of the World (Sarabande Books 1996) was chosen by Philip Levine as the winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry. Her second book House of Poured-Out Waters (Illinois Press) is forthcoming from Illinois Press in 2001.