Field Trip: Exhibit
How far it’s come, epochs
and continents. Before man
deified the lightning’s fire,
its tuba heart had clunked
from the cage of its body.
Before mother clasped infant,
on guard against the tall grass
transformed by night,
it shit great cairns, humped,
they think, some clumsy way.
Gathered round its bones
we sense that something’s
changing in the air,
under those same stars
that now, like it, we’ve named.
2013 Philbrick Poetry Project
After earning his M.F.A. from Ohio State University, David O'Connell taught high school English for nearly a decade. His poems have been published in Columbia Poetry Review, Drunken Boat, Poet Lore, and Rattle, among other journals. He has received two fellowships from the Rhode Island State Council of the Arts.