The Cuckoo, by David Hopes
Posted on April 18, 2019
Cuckoo recommends herself to certain souls
by reason of her homelife, which is none.
Lays her eggs in others’ nests–famous for it–
confident that her lummox progeny
will triumph over whatever wren or finch
was intended as the true inheritor.
(The happy-go-lucky male lacks even this
responsibility. He fucks and flies and is,
therefore, a god.)
Cuckoo knows to open his ears to beneficial discourse,
for what goes out as music must come in as wisdom.
Cuckoo stands, then, for enlightenment:
for he is free;
for he devours the noisome things
that otherwise would gnaw the forest bare;
for he is innocent of the heaviness of other lives,
and so marks in purity
the ways of the Wood to Come.
The first road is the best road until it is not,
and then it is again.
Cuckoo woke me as I slept upon a stone
in Connemara, and for twelve months I was blessed.
Cuckoo cried in the sassafras above my head.
Flee the coming wrath, he told me. I did not look back.
We have the black billed and the yellow billed.
Know them apart by the varied silence left behind in air.
The cuckoo who has learned what he
must say to earn his morning bit cries out:
Reflect on impermanence, for the leaf falls, then the tree.
Release your mind even from the Hereafter.
Abandon attachment. Abandon regret.
The cuckoo in the next grove, gray, and
much sought after for his wisdom calls:
For seven days refrain from that which makes you beautiful. For seven days
meditate upon the caterpillar.
Then return to me.
Seven days upon the caterpillar being hard,
few return.
The gods bestow their blessing,
cuckoo having recommend himself to them
by reason of things that were not his doing: spending nothing,
pausing for nothing, cashing in where he had not invested.
The bodhisattvas all sigh “Blessed!”
to the glade where the cuckoos called,
longing, paradoxically, to obtain, enclose,
to be enshrined in their sharp hearts forever.
“Cuckoo” says the cuckoo–
of all testaments, the single truth.
David Brendan Hopes is a prolific poet, playwright, and painter. His plays Abbott’s Dance, 7 Reece Mews, Edward the King, and, most recently, The Loves of Mr. Lincoln have been produced in New York. The Black Mountain Press will be releasing his new book titled, Night, Sleep, and the Dreams of Lovers, a novel placed in Asheville,NC, in the Spring of 2019. Hopes also wears other hats: He runs a theater company called Black Swan, acts locally, and is a professor of literature and humanities at UNCA.