What Happened to the Badgers
Memories of a world
in which badgers were still numerous
enough to be called a pest
and the old man we called the captain
drinking from a flask of cheap scotch whisky
in his garden on a sunny afternoon
it was said that he was an author
his books obscure and lightly distributed
on topics of science and history
but a science and a history both
of his own invention
a shy man who never spoke to women
he looked to have been assembled
from piece parts left over
found abandoned in the rear of a warehouse
when they came to demolish it
in order to build a new and wider highway
ruining land where once the badgers would breed
a world more similar to the one
that the captain believed he remembered
than that which we live in now.
_________________
Paul Ilechko
Review by Jared Pearce
My favorite part here is how the Captain and the badger (and maybe even me, the reader) all become the badgers, the authors, and eventually get threatened by my wife to have to take Grandfathering classes (apparently such things exist, like the highway in the poem demolishing the badgers’ and the Captains’ warehouses). True, I’m offering a little too much of myself here, but that’s really the point of the poem, I think.
Review by Nancy Christopherson
A fine character study in one beautifully paced, spaced, lineated collection of tercets, merely one sentence in length, so cleverly managed and set in quality imagery with just the right amount of rich detail. I am left with the feeling of gentle solitude, perhaps bewilderment, definitely loss, remorse, and a surprising tender affection for the character who has passed and the wildlife which has disappeared at the hands of development. An epitaph, I think, full of empathy, appreciation, a kind of distant love, treated with the fine remote story-telling which leaves a reader smiling and nodding in understanding and gratitude.