Poems by Frank William Finney
“The Cullers”
(Littleton, Massachusetts, 1960s)
By Frank William Finney
Their scissors sharp
their aim, precise,
they’d snip & snip
& snip all day
and fill their barrels
full of fuzzy heads
in the lot
behind the hatchery.
I remember the stains
on the smocks they wore
and the way they puffed
on cigarettes,
indifferent to
the blood,
the flies,
the sequinned eyes.
The short-lived
chirping
of the cancelled cocks.
“Omikuji”
By Frank William Finney
Make eyes at the moon
over Paradise Bay
while oilers wink
at polar bears
and madmen lead
the world astray.
Take tea in the clouds
on Cavanal Hill.
while egos
boast a better bomb
and icebergs melt
the human heart.
“Coop
de Ville”
By Frank William Finney
Afternoons among
the milkweed.
Solo picnics under birch and pine.
I’d bring a pile of books to read
in shelters I built of branch and board
salvaged from abandoned chicken coops
where once the wooded hillside thrived
with the caws of crows, calls of jays;
chatter of sparrows and chickadees.
Today a road snakes through those hills
where money cleared land to make a place
to raise roofs,
grow lawns, and park new cars
where the paths of my youth
once led to woods
all vanished
from the hills like the years.
- Frank William Finney is an award-winning poet from Massachusetts who taught literature in Thailand for 25 years. His poems have appeared in Brussels Review, CommuterLit, The Frogmore Papers, Penn Journal of Arts and Sciences (PJAS), Seventh Quarry Press, The Hemlock Journal, and elsewhere. His chapbook The Folding of the Wings was published in 2022.