Waiting with the Donkey — Blackbird Archive

← v10n2, Fall 2011

Oh, America, you are those young fools

waiting by the donkey, while a madman

strops a knife and tells his son to look

the other way. You had a big breakfast—

sausage, egg like a temple’s golden dome

on its desert of toast, but now you’re bored,

so to pass the time, you take up a stick

to harry a lizard from bush to bush

while jets plow furrows in the fallow sky.

That sky belongs to every hawk you name

after yourself, and it’s full of invisible

voices. Someone may be listening, or maybe

not. But then the lizard bites you, and you

pick up a rock, and things get serious.

politics religion war

Nick Lantz

Nick Lantz is the author of two collections of poetry: We Don’t Know We Don’t Know (Graywolf Press, 2010), which won the 2011 GLCA New Writers Award for poetry, the 2010 Posner Book-Length Poetry Award, and the 2009 Bakeless Poetry Prize; The Lightning That Strikes the Neighbors’ House (University of Wisconsin Press, 2010), which won the 2010 Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry. His poems have appeared in Mid-American Review, Prairie Schooner, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, Poetry Daily, and FIELD, and have been featured on the nationally syndicated radio program The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor . He has received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. He has taught creative writing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the Tinker Mountain Writers’ Workshop, Queens University of Charlotte Low-Residency MFA program, and Gettysburg College, where he was the 2010–2011 Emerging Writer Lecturer. He is a visiting assistant professor of English at Franklin & Marshall College. Photo by Vicky Lantz