Carol Frost’s eleven collections include The Queen's Desertion, I Will Say Beauty, Love and Scorn: New and Selected Poems, and most recently Honeycomb,
which the Florida Book Awards named the gold medal winner for 2010. Poems have appeared in four Pushcart Prize anthologies; and the National Endowment for the Arts, Poets’ Prize and Elliston Award committees have honored her work. She is the Theodore Bruce and Barbara Lawrence Alfond Chair at Rollins College, Winter Park, Florida.
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Angry Birds
for DF and LF
World 4
on his father’s I-phone,
he faces nothing he can’t strike down.
It’s as if he is split in two,
for while his hands move coolly
and his body is still,
the eyes in his head are the birds
flying against
the monkey kingdom.
Chimps chatter,
bridges cross voids,
there are teetering
wooden buildings and a huge
blind catapult on the opposite cliff.
If looking away were not
the crumbling of his entire
morning, so near the top
tier, he might hear his father
enter the living room
and stand by his chair.
Only when he is summoned
as if from far, far away
but in a tone like falconry
can he return
to himself. The eyes blink,
the nostrils draw in,
and his head tilts upward—
the cries of the birds
no match for
the frightening softness
of his spoken name.