by Moira Magneson
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| AI-generated image by Shutterstock for The New Verse News. |
Three days
we've watched
the acorn
woodpecker
perched atop
the telephone
pole
bright red
crown
black beak
driving
into
the glass
insulator
over and over.
His fury
for the bird
who looks
just like him—
side-eye
glittering—
knows
no bounds.
He refuses
to give up
the fight
with his own
reflection.
He will win
this war.
He will not
surrender.
Each will hammer
the other down.
They will stop
at nothing.
Author’s Note: "Small Differences" addresses the June 12, 2024 Hezbollah rocket attacks on Israel which came after Israel killed a senior Hezbollah commander in southeastern Lebanon in a June 11 airstrike. The poem's title is based on Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic concept of “the narcissism of small differences" in which he proposes that people tend to amplify the minor differences between themselves, leading to feelings of hostility, estrangement, and contempt.
Moira Magneson's full-length collection of poems In the Eye of the Elephant will be published by Sixteen Rivers Press in 2025. Her novella A River Called Home—a river fable illustrated by Robin Center was released by Toad Road Press in early 2024. She is currently working as the poet-in-residence for ForestSong, artist Andie Thrams' project exploring solastalgia, biophilia, and resilience in the face of wildfire devastation and the climate crisis.
