After the hurricane of the late forties,
Peter Polite says, in the live-oak trees
Were weird, macabre macaws
And ash-colored cockatoos, blown overseas
From Nassau and the West Indies.
These hopped about like dead men's thoughts
Among the draggled Spanish moss,
Preening themselves, all at a loss,
Preening faint _caws_,
And shrieking from nostalgia--
With dull screams like a child
Born with neuralgia--
And this seems true to me,
Fitting the landscape's drab grotesquery.