Two Old Crows, poem by Vachel Lindsay

TWO OLD CROWS
by Vachel Lindsay

Two old crows sat on a fence rail.
Two old crows sat on a fence rail,
Thinking of effect and cause,
Of weeds and flowers,
And nature’s laws.
One of them muttered, one of them stuttered,
One of them stuttered, one of them muttered.
Each of them thought far more than he uttered.
One crow asked the other crow a riddle.
One crow asked the other crow a riddle:
The muttering crow
Asked the stuttering crow,
“Why does a bee have a sword to his fiddle?
Why does a bee have a sword to his fiddle?”
“Bee-cause,” said the other crow,
“Bee-cause,
B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B-cause.”

Just then a bee flew close to their rail:—
“Buzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz             zzzzzzzzz             zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz ZZZZZZZZ.”
And those two black crows
Turned pale,
And away those crows did sail.
Why?
B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B-cause.
B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B-cause.
“Buzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz             zzzzzzzzz             zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz ZZZZZZZZ.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Nicholas Vachel Lindsay was born in Springfield, Illinois, in 1879 — in a house where Abraham Lincoln had visited several times. He is considered the father of modern singing poetry, as he referred to it, in which verses are meant to be sung or chanted. Because of his identity as a performance artist and his use of American Midwest themes, Lindsay became known in the 1910s as the “Prairie Troubador.” The Illinois Historic Preservation Agency helps to maintain the Vachel Lindsay House at 603 South Fifth Street in Springfield, the site of Lindsay’s birth and death in 1931. (Read more at wikipedia.org and poetryfoundation.org.)

Photo: “Two Crows on a Fence” by kitten, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.