CATHERINE STAPLES on

William Butler Yeats
The Stare's Nest by My Window

The bees build in the crevices
Of loosening masonry, and there
The mother birds bring grubs and flies.
My wall is loosening, honey bees

Come build in the empty house of the stare.
We are closed in, and the key is turned
On our uncertainty; somewhere
A man is killed, or a house burned,

Yet no clear fact to be discerned:
Come build in the empty house of the stare
A barricade of stone or of wood;
Some fourteen days of civil war;

Last night they trundled down the road
That dead young soldier in his blood:
Come build in the empty house of the stare.
We had fed the heart on fantasies,

The heart’s grown brutal from the fare,
More substance in our enmities
Than in our love; oh, honey-bees
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

Catherine Staples is the author of The Rattling Window (Ashland Poetry Press), winner of the McGovern Prize, and Never a Note Forfeit, winner of the Keystone Chapbook Prize. Her poems have appeared in The Common, Gettysburg Review, Kenyon Review, Poetry, The Southern Review, 32 Poems, The Yale Review, and The Academy of American Poets.  She is the recipient of Southern Poetry Review’s Guy Owen Prize, a Walter Dakin Fellowship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and residencies at the Tyrone Gutherie Center at Annaghmakerrig.  She teaches humanities seminars and creative writing classes in the Honors and English programs at Villanova University.