"The Halo That Would Not Light" Poetry Response

The Halo That Would Not Light


When, after many years, the raptor beak
Let loose of you,

                          He dropped your tiny body
In the scarab-colored hollow
                        
                         Of a carriage, left you like a finch
Wrapped in its nest of linens wound

With linden leaves in a child’s cardboard box.

Tonight the wind is hover-

Hunting as the leather seats of swings go back
And forth with no one in them

As certain and invisible as
                       Red scarves silking endlessly

From a magician’s hollow hat
                      And the spectacular catastrophe

Of your endless childhood
                                                  Is done.
   
                                   -Lucie Brock-Broido

-Background on Lucie Brock-Broido from Wipedia, the free encyclopedia.


Lucie Brock-Broido (born 22 May 1956 in Pittsburgh, PA) is the author of three collections of poetry. She has received many honors, including the Witter-Bynner prize of Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Harvard Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Award, the Harvard-Danforth Award for Distinction in Teaching, the Jerome J. Shestack Poetry Prize from American Poetry Review, two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, and a Guggenheim fellowship. She was described as an Elliptical Poet by critic Stephen Burt.
Brock-Broido is currently Director of Poetry in the Writing Division at Columbia University in New York City.

This is a simple poem about childhood and how everyone looses it. "The raptor beak" is a reference to the childhood fairy tale of the  stork carrying a baby to its' home. "scarab-colored" is a shade of yellow. So far the poem is talking about children being dropped into their yellow colored cribs by a stork. When I was a kid I found enjoyment in empty boxes! The classic image of a baby playing with the box their toy came in. I believe this was the reason for her reference to "a child's cardboard box, the finch being only a metaphor. The ind certainly blows empty swings and scarves, just as childhood will certainly end. The magicians hat being empty was a very good touch. It shows how in childhood years, a bunny would be in that hat but an adult knows it's empty, it's only a trick. " . . . your endless childhood Is done."