Poem of the Month

selected by David Underdown

My Crow

by Raymond Carver

A crow flew into the tree outside my window.
It was not Ted Hughes’s crow, or Galway’s crow.
Or Frost’s, Pasternak’s, or Lorca’s crow.
Or one of Homer’s crows, stuffed with gore,
after the battle. This was just a crow.
That never fit in anywhere in its life,
or did anything worth mentioning.
It sat there on the branch for a few minutes.
Then picked up and flew beautifully
out of my life.

Raymond Carver’s down beat poems celebrate the ordinary, often in an intensely personal way. Here in ten short lines he puts his stamp on a sight we’ve all seen, a crow landing in a tree that stays there for a few minutes and then flies off again. Carver makes it his crow – and then lets it go. This poem first appeared in ‘Poetry’ magazine in 1984 and is part of his collection, ‘Where Water Comes Together With Water’ published by Vintage Books.