The Two-Headed Calf Poem by Laura Gilpin

"The Two-headed Calf" is a nine-line poem by the American poet and nurse Laura Gilpin, first collected in The Hocus-Pocus of the Universe (Doubleday, 1977), the book that won the 1976 Walt Whitman Award. It follows a calf born with two heads who will not survive the night, and it argues, very gently, that one perfect evening is still a whole life.

If you have landed here after reading it somewhere and feeling winded, you're in good company. It's a tiny poem that does something huge to people. We've read it many times, and it still catches us off guard.

The poem is still in copyright, so we don't print it in full here. You can read the complete text at the Poetry Foundation, which carries it with permission from Doubleday. Read it there first, then come back. It takes about thirty seconds, and everything below will make more sense.

What Happens in the Poem

The poem has two short stanzas, and each one lives in a different time. The first is tomorrow. It opens like this:

Tomorrow when the farm boys find this
freak of nature, they will wrap his body

Laura Gilpin, "The Two-headed Calf", from The Hocus-Pocus of the Universe (Doubleday, 1977)

That first stanza is the world's version of the calf. He's a curiosity, a specimen, something to be wrapped up and carried off to a museum. It's flat, practical, a little cold.

Then the second stanza turns on a single word: tonight. Tonight the calf is alive, out in the field with his mother, on a summer evening with the moon coming up over the orchard and wind moving through the grass. And in the last line, as he looks up, Gilpin gives him something no ordinary calf gets. Because he has two heads, he sees double the stars.

How Gilpin Makes Nine Lines Do So Much

The whole poem hinges on that move from "tomorrow" to "tonight". Gilpin tells us the ending first, the death and the museum, and then refuses to stay there. Once the second stanza starts, the poem never goes back to tomorrow. That's a choice, and it's the heart of the piece.

Watch the pronouns, too. In the opening line the calf is "this", an object. By the second stanza he is "he", alive, a someone with a mother. The farm boys' word for him is a "freak of nature", and the poem disagrees with them without ever saying so out loud.

The language is plain almost to the point of being prose. There are no rhymes and no fancy images, just a field, a moon, an orchard, grass.

A 1978 review in the Chicago Review described Gilpin's style as matter of fact, with a "cool clarity", and noted that she rarely uses more than one comparison in a poem. You can feel that restraint here. She saves everything for one image at the very end.

And that final image is the real gift. The thing that makes the calf a "freak", the extra head, is exactly what lets him see twice as much beauty.

His difference is also his blessing. Gilpin doesn't explain this. She just lets the sky do it.

Who Was Laura Gilpin?

Laura Crafton Gilpin was born in Wisconsin on 10 October 1950 and grew up in Indiana. She studied at Sarah Lawrence College and earned an MFA in poetry from Columbia University. Her first book, The Hocus-Pocus of the Universe, was chosen by the poet William Stafford for the Academy of American Poets' Walt Whitman Award in 1976 and published by Doubleday in 1977.

Then her life took a turn many readers don't know about. After teaching creative writing at the New York Public Library, she studied nursing at NYU and became a registered nurse in 1981. She worked in paediatric nursing at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York and in adult oncology at California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco.

She was also a founding staff member of Planetree, a nonprofit that works to make hospital care centred on the patient as a whole person. She kept writing alongside that work. Gilpin died on 15 February 2007 at her home in Fairhope, Alabama, after a diagnosis of glioblastoma. Her second and final collection, The Weight of a Soul: New and Selected Poems, was published after her death by Franklin Street Press in 2008, as a Planetree Memorial Edition.

It's tempting to read the nurse into "The Two-headed Calf", but the poem came first. Perhaps the same attention that wrote it, the habit of staying with a fragile life instead of looking away, is what later drew her to the bedside.

Why Readers Keep Coming Back to It

If we're truthful, most of us spend a huge share of our lives in the first stanza. We live in tomorrow: the deadline, the test result, the bill, the conversation we're dreading. We already know how certain things will end, and we let that knowledge flatten the evening we're actually standing in.

The calf doesn't know about the museum. But even if he did, the poem suggests, it wouldn't make the moon any less risen or the grass any less moving. Tonight is real. Tonight is enough.

That's why it's such a natural poem to pass to someone who is grieving, someone caring for a person who is seriously ill, or anyone who has felt different and been treated as a curiosity. It doesn't pretend death isn't coming. It just refuses to let death have the last word on a life.

Try This Tonight

Here's a small practice the poem invites. The next time your mind runs ahead to a tomorrow you're dreading, stop and say the word "tonight" to yourself. Then name three things in your own north field: what you can see, what you can hear, who is near you.

You don't have to fix tomorrow in that moment. You're allowed to put it down for a few minutes. Gilpin's calf can't change what's coming either, and his evening is still perfect.

And if you are the one who feels like the "freak of nature" right now, the odd one out, the one people talk about rather than to, read that last line again. The very thing that sets you apart might be the thing that lets you see more.

Where to Read More Laura Gilpin

• Read "The Two-headed Calf" in full at the Poetry Foundation.
• Read "The Bath", first published in Poetry magazine in 1984, also at the Poetry Foundation.
• Read her biography at the Academy of American Poets.
• Look for The Hocus-Pocus of the Universe (Doubleday, 1977) and The Weight of a Soul: New and Selected Poems (Franklin Street Press, 2008) through your library or a bookseller.

Nine lines, one night, twice the sky. Some poems ask very little of your time and give back far more than they take. This is one of them. Go and look up tonight.