“Myna Says” by Barbara Cully

Barbara Cully, PSP faculty member (1997, 2003, and 2006)

The Prague Summer Program had the effect on me it was designed to have on any faculty member or student, but perhaps especially a native Southern Californian:  It welcomed me to all the strata of the Old World—art, architecture, politics, war, food—everything we consider “culture,” and thereby changed my perspective on, and practice of, poetry.

I wrote “Myna Says” while listening to The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert. I worked some of the information from the book into my composition, blending that with ideas I’ve absorbed from a life-long study of both anthropology and cosmology. The impetus for the poem is the fact that we live in a profoundly scary time, which brings about both darkness and humor.