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.
|