Bats in the Belfry

Last Thursday, I used Roethke's poem "The Bat." This week, I searched on line for a copy of Randall Jarrell's poem "Bats," but never found a complete version. So back to my trusted copy:

Bats

A bat is born
Naked and blind and pale.
His mother makes a pocket of her tail
And catches him. He clings to her long fur
By his thumbs and toes and teeth.
And then the mother dances through the night
Doubling and looping, soaring, somersaulting--
Her baby hangs on underneath.
All night, in happiness, she hunts and flies.
Her high sharp cries
Like shining needlepoints of sound
Go out into the night and, echoing back,
Tell her what they have touched.
She hears how far it is, how big it is,
Which way it's going:
She lives by hearing.
The mother eats the moths and gnats she catches
In full flight; in full flight
The mother drinks the water of the pond
She skims across. Her baby hangs on tight.
Her baby drinks the milk she makes him
In moonlight or starlight, in mid-air.
Their single shadow, printed on the moon
Or fluttering across the stars,
Whirls on all night; at daybreak
The tired mother flaps home to her rafter.
The others all are there.
They hang themselves up by their toes,
They wrap themselves in their brown wings.
Bunched upside-down, they sleep in air.
Their sharp ears, their sharp teeth, their quick sharp faces
Are dull and slow and mild.
All the bright day, as the mother sleeps,
She folds her wings about her sleeping child.

Perhaps Jarrell's best known poems are "The Death of the Ball-Turret Gunner" and "Eighth Air Force"... the differences between the war poems and this poem are notable. A new discovery in my Jarrell searches: his children's book "The Bat Poet" --illustrated by Maurice Sendak--was among the Best Illustrated Children's Books 1964 (NYT) Year's Best Juveniles 1964 (NYT).