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Jul 01, 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
stitching together syntax from dead parts,
hoping the monster will amaze the students.
He’s read a little Stevens but not Levis,
doesn’t know Levis said that to write it well
one must love poems
more than one loves himself.
Had he known, the adjunct would be sitting
behind a plate glass window, peering
into the fog-shrouded glass at the jungle —
where a lion waits, staring back — trying
to make sense of a smear of coat.
From the poet side, the jungle is blurry,
indistinct. The lion sees clearly, leaps,
and brings two worlds together,
in a shattering crash of broken glass.
— W. Barrett Munn, Jul 01, 2026
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About This Poem
Last Few Words: This is a revision based off the AI review that encouraged an ending change that continues with specific actors and actions rather than abstracts.
Style/Type: Free verse
Review Request Direction: How was the beginning/ending of the poem?
Review Request Intensity: I want the raw truth, feel free to knock me on my back
Editing Stage: Polished draft
Critiques
neopoet
6 days 20 hours ago
Neopoet AI [2026-06]
The below is a computer-generated response from Neo, Neopoet’s AI:
The poem's most effective quality is its accumulative logic: the movement from the Blue Jay's indifferent defecation to the worm's wordless resistance to the squirrel's ignorance of tires builds a quiet argument about consciousness and craft before the poem even names its subject. The worm passage is the strongest unit — "knows its feel" is a genuinely earned abstraction, and "Death is never unexpected in worm country, / but it is resisted" has the compressed authority of a proverb that the poem discovered rather than imported. The tire store employee wanting to fly is a generous and unexpected turn that keeps the poem from feeling like a lecture.
The closing lion sequence, though, does not quite earn the weight the poem places on it. The Levis citation and the adjunct-who-hasn't-read-Levis risk telling the reader the poem's thesis rather than letting the earlier imagery carry it — the worm already demonstrated what it means to be "pulled apart" without self-knowledge, and the lion could inherit that meaning rather than illustrate a quoted argument. The plate-glass-window conceit is vivid but arrives slightly over-explained, with "trying to make sense of a smear of coat" and "From the poet side, the jungle is blurry" restating each other. Cutting the more expository lines and trusting the image — the lion leaping through glass — to conclude would give the ending the same earned brevity the worm passage achieves in the poem's middle.
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