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Take Heart: A Conversation in Poetry: The Pet
Edited and introduced by Wesley McNair, Maine Poet Laureate
This week’s poem by the late Constance Hunting, a Maine poet and editor, describes a monkey she has trained to sit and write. What the monkey represents, she is not here to explain, of course. All we know is that she admires the “strange marks” the monkey makes, and that the two of them work together.
The Pet by Constance Hunting
O say see look at my lit tle monkey she so puzzled and charming with that almost human frownshe sits in her lit tle chair at her little table she holds a pen she is writingmaking strange marks on the white petalled paper I am very proud of hershe is coming along very nicely but sometimes chatters more than I preferand would tear up the page chew it to bits did I not interfere always calmly and stroke her down
Take Heart: A Conversation in Poetry is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. Poem copyright © 2000 Constance Hunting. Reprinted from Natural Things: Collected Poems 1969-1998, The National Poetry Foundation, 2000, by permission of The National Poetry Foundation. Questions about submitting to Take Heart may be directed to Gibson Fay-LeBlanc, Special Consultant to the Maine Poet Laureate, at mainepoetlaureate@gmail.com or 207-228-8263. Take Heart: Poems from Maine, an anthology collecting the first two years of this column, is now available from Down East Books.