The Bat

By Ellen Bryant Voigt b. 1943

Reading in bed, full of sentiment

for the mild evening and the children

asleep in adjacent rooms, hearing them

cry out now and then the brief reports

of sufficient imagination, and listening

at the same time compassionately

to the scrabble of claws, the fast treble

in the chimney—

then it was out,

not a trapped bird

beating at the seams of the ceiling,

but a bat lifting toward us, falling away.

Dominion over every living thing,

large brain, a choice of weapons—

Shuddering, in the lit hall

we swung repeatedly against

its rising secular face

until it fell; then

shoveled it into the yard for the cat

who shuttles easily between two worlds.

Ellen Bryant Voigt, “The Bat” from The Forces of Plenty (New York: W.W. Norton, 1983).

Source: The Forces of Plenty (1983)

Biography

Ellen Bryant Voigt has lived in Vermont for many years; she spent her childhood in rural Virginia, where she grew up on her family’s farm. Her poems traverse the worlds of motherhood, the rural South, family, and music. Her 1995 collection Kyrie: Poems is a book-length sonnet sequence exploring the lives of people affected by the influenza epidemic of 1918–1919. Poet Edward Hirsch wrote of her early book, Claiming Kin (1976), . . .

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