There’s a pond an hour’s walk from town.
I’m out there every Saturday.
Others walk by it, but I stay,
reading Homer to the ducks.

The ducks are unappreciative
of my painful Greek, and the pains I’m taking.
But, really, it’s just my way of quacking,
reading Homer to the ducks.

Angry Achilles, proud Agamemnon,
Diomedes so dourly resolute.
They’re indifferent to the whole dispute,
but I tell the story to the ducks.

They’re my “fit audience, though few.”
Yeats had fifty-nine swans at Coole;
I’ve got a little, ground-fed pool,
down in a dell, and two brown ducks.

But poetry happens where it will;
and it’s just as well it happens here
with a paddling audience that doesn’t care
about deaths by ships: compatible ducks

buoyant in their inbred serenity.
They perish forever and they never die.
I bet Homer himself was out, one day,
reading Homer to the ducks.

It must be wonderful to be so dumb.
We sink in water and history.
They float on both, ignoring me
reading Homer to the ducks.