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POETRY BY DANIEL G. SNETHEN

daniel

Daniel G. Snethen lives and teaches on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. He is extremely interested in dark poetry. Snethen is also a naturalist and studies the local flora and fauna. He has a pet rattlesnake named Witten.

PICNICKING ON THE BOSTON COMMONS

By day picnickers eat their sandwiches
prepared on unclothed tables.
An errant slice of cheese,
a slab of meat or salty chip
retrieved from picnic table
help construct the perfect sandwich
wedged between two slices of bread,
casually set down
to take a drink of a favorite beverage.

Then picked up again
with ungloved hands,
washed down with final libation.

At night these tables serve
as theatre stages
for copiously urinating rats
engaged is licentious behavior.

YOU’LL FIND THEM EVERYWHERE

The rats of Boston?
They’re everywhere,
especially upon the Commons.

You’ll find them on the beach
at the harbor wharfs.
You’ll find them on Beacon Hill.

They’re everywhere.

You’ll find them in dirty back alleys
and newly developed districts.
You’ll find them with the poor
and juxtaposed with the rich.

You’ll find them everywhere.

By day Boston is a diurnal city
of pedestrian humanity.
But at night the cliental changes.

You’ll find them everywhere.

The rats, the rats, the rats,
you’ll find them everywhere.

Scampering about, cleaning the city
of food scraps and discarded trash,
sanitizing with urine and feces
everywhere they go.

The Rats, the rats, oh
you’ll find them everywhere.

FINNISH CEMETERY

Grey granite headstones, once whitewashed
by gray ghostly yellow-eyed specters,
softly call for their return.  Beckoning these
bygone crepuscular denizens of the Donnely
Woods to once again seek rest and refuge
upon their lichen-scarred surfaces, after
hunting the Idaho mountain meadows of
Long Valley for short-tailed subnivean voles.

Long have they stood sentinel over the bodies of
Finnish settlers and long have they been one with
the ritual and routine of this circumboreal gray owl.
Together they have watched as the trees have
fallen, the dirt roads graveled and paved. A
nebulous existence full of shadows and silence.

Bulldozers, hammers, concentrated construction.
Land developers rape the valley, bringing economical
boon, ecological bust and death for the great gray owl.

Grey granite headstones still stand in crepuscular nights
but there is no visible flapping of great gray owl wings.
Yet, the cool silent autumn air is flapped away by spectral
wings of feathered gray as the spirits of the Finnish dead
watch the ethereal spectacle of dead owls flying.