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Jul 03, 2026
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Lions In Poetry
Lions In Poetry
Above on a branch, a Blue Jay shits
on the grass.
The blades of grass don’t cooperate
with the man’s vision.
Bent like a convertible after a head-on collision,
top still down, he’s 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,
scrounging for scraps in the dark, relying
on sense, not sight —
a worm in rat’s clothing.
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 more Levis.
Sitting behind a plate glass window, he gazes
at the fog-shrouded Savannah
where a lion lies hidden in the grass.
The lion doesn’t ponder life’s mysteries,
doesn’t wonder about knowledge
or how it’s acquired.
His instincts engage more urgent matters.
He sees clearly through the fog and leaps.
Glass shatters.
— W. Barrett Munn, Jul 03, 2026
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About This Poem
Last Few Words: Sixth revision
Style/Type: Free verse
Review Request Direction: Is the internal logic consistent?
Review Request Intensity: I want the raw truth, feel free to knock me on my back
Editing Stage: Final polish
Critiques
neopoet
5 days 4 hours ago
Neopoet AI (premium) [2026-06]
The below is a computer-generated response from Neo, Neopoet’s AI:
The poem's central strategy is a chain of linked observations, each creature and person handed off to the next through a shared trait or object, and this daisy-chain structure is its most distinctive achievement. The movement from Blue Jay to grass to the man edging his lawn, then downward to the Robin and worm, outward to the ants and squirrel, and finally into the tire store and the adjunct's laboratory, feels deliberately associative rather than random, and the payoff at the end rewards that patience.
The worm sequence is the strongest passage. The line about the worm being "silent as a poet going about his craft, / although being pulled apart" earns its comparison, and the assertion that the worm "doesn't know / that water has a name but knows its feel" is genuinely precise thinking about the difference between naming and sensation. The follow-through—"Death is never unexpected in worm country, / but it is resisted"—extends that thought without overexplaining it.
The recurrence of "mute, deaf, and blind" from the worm to the rat is doing intentional work, and the phrase "a worm in rat's clothing" is a satisfying inversion of the familiar idiom that also ties the two creatures together. This is the kind of internal echo the poem does well.
Where the poem strains is in the transition to the biology adjunct. The Frankenstein figure "stitching together syntax from dead parts, / hoping the monster will amaze the students" is a large tonal and conceptual shift, moving from observed physical detail into literary allegory. The metaphor is legible, but it announces the poem's ambitions more directly than the earlier images did, and the name-dropping of Stevens and Levis risks telling the reader how to place the poem rather than trusting the imagery. Consider whether that literary self-reference is load-bearing or whether the adjunct's situation could carry the meaning on its own.
The ending's leap—the lion crossing from the imagined Savannah through the plate glass—is the poem's boldest move, collapsing the observed world and the imagined one. The shattering glass is a strong final image. What is less clear is how much the fog and the "gazes" prepare for it; the leap might land harder if the boundary between the adjunct's window and the Savannah were established as more solid earlier, so that its breaking registers as genuine violation rather than dream-logic. Right now the "fog-shrouded Savannah" already reads as unreal, which softens the shock of the crossing.
One smaller note: several creatures are described through what they lack—curiosity about tire weight, knowledge of water's name, pondering of life's mysteries. This is an effective through-line, but the lion who "doesn't ponder life's mysteries" arrives at nearly the same formulation as the worm, and tightening one of these could keep the closing distinction sharper.
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