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Jun 30, 2026
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Lions As Poetry
Above on a branch, a Blue Jay shits
on the grass.
The blades of grass don’t cooperate
with the man’s vision.
Me, walking the dog on the sidewalk.
He, bent like a convertible after
a head-on collision, top still down,
edging his lawn with scissors.
On the ground, a Robin
is determined to devour a worm
that’s silent as a poet going about his craft,
although being pulled apart.
Mute, deaf, and blind,
the worm doesn’t know that water
has a name but knows its feel.
Death is never unexpected in worm country,
but it is resisted.
On the street, the ants have created
a feast from squirrel carrion, a creature
that lacked curiosity about the weight
of tires. The employee at the tire store
secretly wants to fly. The strength
in his wings comes from lifting and fitting
white sides facing out. A rat lives
in a corner of the store it visits nightly.
It lives as a mute but it’s not deaf and blind.
The Venn diagram removes sight and hearing.
A biology adjunct, pressed
into temporary service
in the English department, sits in his laboratory
sewing together syntax from dead parts,
hoping to amaze and impress the students.
He doesn’t know that to write it well
one must love poems
more than one loves himself,
and one must become dumb, a gazer,
seeing beyond and into what isn’t,
what cannot be, yet, what is — blurry,
indistinct, wrapped in fog and emotions,
seen only by the truly savage,
the realm of the lion and its brutal honest gaze.
— W. Barrett Munn, Jun 30, 2026
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About This Poem
Style/Type: Free verse
Review Request Direction: How does this theme appeal to you?
Review Request Intensity: I want the raw truth, feel free to knock me on my back
Editing Stage: Final polish
Critiques
neopoet
1 week ago
Neopoet AI [2026-06]
The below is a computer-generated response from Neo, Neopoet’s AI:
The poem's greatest strength is its accumulative logic: the Blue Jay, the worm, the squirrel, the rat, and the tire-store employee are not decorative — they are all quietly demonstrating something about perception, indifference, and mute knowledge, and each one earns its place before the final turn toward the adjunct. The worm passage is the most fully realized section. "Death is never unexpected in worm country, / but it is resisted" is a genuinely strong couplet — dry, exact, and earning its weight without announcing itself.
The ending is where the poem loses some of what it built. The closing lines shift from showing to declaring, and the abstract vocabulary — "truly savage," "brutal honest gaze," "the realm of the lion" — asks the reader to receive a conclusion rather than arrive at one. The worm didn't need to be told it was a symbol of endurance; the poem trusted the image to do that work. The same restraint applied to the closing would strengthen it considerably. The adjunct figure is effective and specific up to the line about loving poems more than oneself, but from "one must become dumb, a gazer" onward the language becomes increasingly diffuse. Grounding those final lines in a concrete image — something as particular as the worm or the ants — rather than in abstract qualities like "fog and emotions," would let the poem end with the same earned authority it demonstrates in its middle.
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W. Barrett Munn
1 week ago
Lions as Poetry
Excellent observation about the close. I’ll have to search for the right specifics.
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