AMSTERDAM REVIEW
  • Home
    • Poetry
    • Translations
    • Fiction
    • Interviews
    • Essays
    • Photography
    • Fine Arts
  • Masthead
  • Issues
    • Us v. World Revisited
    • Fall 2025
    • Spring 2025
    • Fall 2024
    • Spring 2024
    • Fall 2023
    • Spring 2023
    • Fall 2022
    • Summer 2022
    • Exilé Sans Frontières
  • AR Tunes
  • Submissions

Fable: The Barn Owl, the Woodworm & the Rain
​by Anthony Caleshu

Whoever wants wisdom can have it, said the barn owl, who did not have wisdom, but who’d heard it spoken by the woodworm that infested the barn rafters.   From the peak of the barn’s hip roof, the woodworm claimed not to have wisdom but to have seen it recently whilst watching the rain fall upon the ocean in the sunlight, driving shoals of mackerel to flood the nearby harbour where there had been no fish for months.  The townspeople took in the fish by the bucket and after roasting and eating the fish laid out their blackened skins, whose scales sparkled with stars from the sky so that they could see the source of the rain that had brought the fish to the harbour.
To the barn they followed the rain and claimed it as home, thick in the middle of trees and streams.   The rain beat softly on the barn roof until it found its way through the slates and onto the heads of the townspeople who were now living in the barn. This went on for years and years until under duress from the rain (and the woodworm) the roof sagged lower and lower until finally collapsing a waterfall onto the townspeople’s heads.  Not everyone is prone to wisdom said the rain, wondering what the townspeople would do next.  But the townspeople themselves did not wonder, they danced and danced until one day in its own infinite wisdom the rain stopped. And for that, they danced all the more.

Anthony Caleshu
Anthony Caleshu is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Xenia etc. (Shearsman, 2023). His poems have appeared widely in Anglo-American journals such as TLS, Granta, Narrative, Agni, and Boston Review (as winner of the Boston Review Poetry Prize). He is Professor of Poetry at University of Plymouth in SW England.

<<  Conjurer by Nicholas Hogg

Three by Victoria Chang >>

​Home          Masthead          Submissions     

T&Cs
Picture
© 2025 Amsterdam Review. All rights reserved.
  • Home
    • Poetry
    • Translations
    • Fiction
    • Interviews
    • Essays
    • Photography
    • Fine Arts
  • Masthead
  • Issues
    • Us v. World Revisited
    • Fall 2025
    • Spring 2025
    • Fall 2024
    • Spring 2024
    • Fall 2023
    • Spring 2023
    • Fall 2022
    • Summer 2022
    • Exilé Sans Frontières
  • AR Tunes
  • Submissions