Page 79

The poem admits that bitterness in art can poison family life, then twists that violence into a bleak image of poetic love.

Hatred, gossip, and getting even are treated as habits that do real domestic damage, not glamorous emotions. The closing comparison is deliberately unsettling: poets kill like birds do with worms, yet the act is still named as love lifted toward the sky. That combination makes affection look consuming rather than gentle.

'Friendship Lost': 'The hatred in a poem / Will get you nowhere / With your wife / And children', so 'we poets kill / Somewhat like birds / do with worms / Loving them, / all the way to the sky'.

The poem names the specific limit of its own genre: a poem made of hatred 'Will get you nowhere' at home, earning no domestic credit against gossip, 'Cutting remarks', and 'Getting even'. Then it turns the confession into a darker self-image - poets 'kill / Somewhat like birds / do with worms' - where killing and 'Loving them' are the same act. The phrase 'all the way to the sky' makes predation into transit: the worm is consumed but also carried aloft. That double sense lets the poem both admit its harm and excuse it, since the poets kill because killing is how they gain altitude. The bird-and-worm figure keeps the moral cost in view even as it justifies the craft.