Sometimes I think my house has become this celestial dumping ground for Salem’s stories — all in service of making this blog a place where Salem’s true character can come alive in fits and short starts.
Why else would someone have sent me this poem inspired by Salem’s ongoing chicken debate? It was penned in black ink on the back of a “nike school innovation fund” pad of red-lined paper, and looks to be hand-written by a woman.
Also, it has these ridiculously cute line drawings of chickens pecking at specks of black feed. Yummy full stops about as big as a period at the end of the lines of poetry.
Check it out the text — it’s got an ABCB rhyming scheme and is fleshed out in four stanzas.
WARNING: THIS IS NOT FOR YOUNG CHILDREN OR FOR CONTENT NAZIS.
—
On Bringing Back Chickens to Salem
It takes me back to the good old days
when chickens ran the yard.
My cock would come out every morning
and stand up straight and hard.
And then from the top of the chicken coop
he’d wake you from your bed.
My cock was a friendly, neighborhood bird
who liked you to pet his head.
But everyone had a cock back then.
It was the regular thing to do.
People were happier with cocks all around,
and the hens seemed happier too.
We’d like to bring those old days back,
but the law’s put that dream to bed.
So we’ll be walking the same old dogs
and petting our pussies instead.
—
Did anyone else notice that this writer doesn’t seem to understand that the group advocating for chickens in Salem isn’t talking about bringing roosters back, just hens?
No matter. I guess hens don’t lend themselves very well to innuendo. Either way, I’m kind of shocked and besmirked by this gift from a stranger. And I kind of love the idea that there is this underground world of rhyming poetry inspired by Salem. Beats a slam poetry night any day of the week.
Some juicy jouissance! Do you suppose Tommy has a twin sister in urban ethnographic foraging, Tammy Eliot? What a fine discovery.
Fabulous! Love it!
This is great! Maybe the writer *did* fully understand that the group advocating for bringing back chickens is only, in fact, talking about bringing back hens and is thus gender exclusive in its vision of the world. The poem’s nostalgia for older days (when roosters were part of Salem, not kept out) is thus a response to the impending gender apartheid of chicken culture in Oregon, and its performance of hyper-masculinity can be understood as a defense mechanism (a raising of the hackles, as it were) against the encroachment of that culture — not to mention a cautionary tale about the types of reactions any sort of apartheid is bound to produce.
If this is a viable reading, then “On Bringing Back Chickens…” becomes a “slippery slope” argument about chickens in Salem: if we allow only hens into Salem now, how long will it be before we start legislating who and what else can legally enter the city limits, and who can’t? And the pun on “cock” — a word which ties the chicken world to the human world — is thus appropriate, not gratuitous, in so far as it asks us to consider how much our treatment of chickens has in common with our treatment of humans (i.e., why the same rules don’t apply to the treatment of chickens as humans). Is this therefore a piece of animal rights verse? A P.E.T.A. poem? A metaphor, a la Orwell’s Animal Farm, for human rights? Perhaps it’s all of the above!
It certainly seems like proof that literary culture is alive and, um, pecking?… in Salem. I just read a wonderful poem at my sister’s wedding, but I kind of wish I had read this one.
Great poem.
Does it strike you as funny that the poem was written — copied, at least — by a chick?
I was just assuming it was… but I’ve known some dudes with some chicktastic handwriting, so perhaps I shouldn’t judge.
And I’ve known some chicks who’ve had some cockamamie ideas too.
Whoever it was has real pluck. All I could come up with were two G-rated chicken limericks with single entendre.
Tee hee. My husband has been memorizing Limericks of late, so maybe I’ll ask him to come up with some chicken ones. Cocky rhymer.
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