For the director, cast, groundlings, and crew of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (now playing at UMF’s Alumni Theater), who–in Farmington lo!—are giving to airy nothing a local habitation and a name.
Adam Naming
My body is tired for the birds that have flown from me;
Their fathomless wings are riding from my brow
In echoes. I have finished naming now:
They are not lost that fall by an unmapped sea.
Twilight is home for wrens in the great oak trees
And for the hawk that in grey caves has lain,
The peacock, host of the rainbow after rain,
And river swan, pearl of earth’s necklaces.
Nests are arrayed and shingled in the air
Beneath the wandering aegis of a word
Chosen by me. When mating calls are heard
My poem moves in the desiring pair.
Envied by hunters, I numbered the animals
Gathered from nature in my baptistery;
The unicorn pranced, eyes arched in mystery,
And zebras passed musing on parallels.
I have uplifted tents within my mind
For timeless griflins with vague wings outspread
And serpents of the field. Even the dead
Are sung and not to quietness resigned.
They have all gone like music from my keeping
Towards the named world. Left in this silent garden,
Tired of my duties as its lonely warden,
I seek forgetfulness at last in sleeping.
– Chico Pennykisser
(Played most gallantly by Poet Henry Braun of Weld)
