Poem Renaissance – Richard Hague

Gyroscope Review is celebrating National Poetry Month with a Poem Renaissance, a review of previously published poems looking for new life and new views. Every day through May 20^th, a new poem to fall in love with all over again.

Time Lapse Photography:
A Mouse Corpse
Devoured By Maggots
by Richard Hague

At first, the grave familiar scene:
a mouse lies among stones and weeds
like a painter’s subject
in a tiny landscape of ruin.
This, we say, this is what
we know of death:
arrest of motion, frigidity,
bleak consummation
of life’s fling and jig.
Death, we know, holds still.

But then the mouse’s body
swells, flexes, rolls,
seems almost to dance in place.
Supermouse muscles bunch
beneath its coat,
rippling its flanks
like the waves of an earthquake
approaching and departing:
maggots, en masse, migrating
from organ to organ,
feed to feed.
Meanwhile
its claws tap rhythm on the ground.
It even shakes its mousy booty—

Then, as if spent
in convulsions
of laughter or grief,
collapsing, matted fur
parting, small bones erupting
from the carrion,
it implodes at last,
flat smear of darkness
in the stricken field,

While its soul, transformed,
now voiced and winged,
ascends, a cloud of thick black flies
that sport and hiss
on the stinking air
and innocent as fresh angels
carry the dance away.

First appeared in Poetry, March 1994

Richard Hague is author or editor of 23 collections of prose and poetry. He was born and raised in Steubenville, Ohio. He is winner of the 1984 CoPoet of the Year from the Ohio Poetry Association for Ripening (The Ohio State University Press 1984), 2003 Appalachian Poetry Book of the Year for Alive in Hard Country (Bottom Dog Press), and the 2012 Weatherford Award in Poetry for During The Recent Extinctions: New & Selected Poems 1984-2012 (Dos Madres Press). His writing has recently appeared in Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts, Northern Appalachian Review, Appalachian Journal, Cincinnati Review, Untelling, and Gyroscope Review.

Don’t forget to read the Spring 2025 Issue, available now, online and in print

Previous Renaissance Poets

April Poets

May Poets