I received this poem-gift in today's email, and poet Stephen Bunch, who has been active in Lawrence area writing and publishing for three decades, graciously consented to reprinting it here:
At the Billy Graham Library
An animatronic cow intones
the life story of the stadium evangelist.
As if a ruminant, even one that speaks,
could know redemption or chew the cud
of any abstraction, unaware
of a meat-hook last judgment.
As if the songs of mechanical birds
were still to be heard in Byzantium.
He sends this bio: Stephen Bunch's work appears in a number of magazines and anthologies. From 1978 to 1988, he edited and published Tellus, a little magazine that featured work by Jack Anderson, Edward Dorn, Harley Elliott, Jane Hirshfield, Denise Low, Paul Metcalf,and Edward Sanders, among others, and Carpool, a chapbook by DonaldLevering. Under the Tellus/Cottonwood Review imprint with Denise Low, he also published a collection of poems by Victor Contoski (A KansasSequence).
