Synopsis:

A mini-chap of tightly-themed poems, published in electronic form.

Book Excerpt:

 Murmuration

 

1)

 Mother slips into sleep

beside the banked fire.

 

The red pulse at its core

warms her bones,

but it’s flesh

that keeps her rooted here,

a steeple of fingers

under the chin.

 

When she opens scribbled lids

to dreams already pulling away,

her hands, twined at the thumb,

flutter.

 

Along the route

of her dreamed migrations,

two birds followed one another

into the guttering shadows.

 

 2)

 

Nature tosses a flock

to the sky

as if from a pail

of water. Ochre beaks

point out in showgirl synch

whatever

it is we’ve missed--

the backscatter

of survival,

the bend and break

of an injured wing.

 

If by some thin volition

it lifts, touching down

on a wire

miles away, it will float

undistinguished

from its fellows,

above the dusk road

in the face of a setting sun.

 

 

3)

 

By the time our father bolted

from his sickbed to squeeze

the nurse’s breast, we’d worked

ourselves into a frenzy of waiting.

 

When he fell back on the pillow,

he’s sleeping, we whispered.

He can’t hear our words’ mad buzz.

 

Outside, a chirping bird

hovered above a broken cricket

dragging through backyard thatch.

 

It rose up, sudden as a mind changing,

and the room sagged with breath

held against the last thing we wanted

to see: a pair of wings escaping,

the world left out of reach.

 

4)

 

A bird calls,

jerks its head

to take in the carnage

of the storm, rubs against

a church pew lodged in the spar

of a splintered telephone pole.

 

Torn blossoms glimmer

above a rich sorrow of worms.

Dazed, the bird has lost

longitude and latitude of home.

 

Hurled through with feathers,

the air is filled with wings luffing

across the rusting sun.

 

All the bird has to do is follow its fellow,

leave a wake of shipwrecked city behind.

 

The machines have all ceased speaking.

Water stains spread, brown-edged maps

to nowhere.

 

5)

A call like a rusty hinge
skreaks overhead.

Garden gates open

only to close again reluctantly.

But this is not about redemption,

it’s about identity

and how the glazed sky

hurled through with feathers

will sometimes part like water

for one bird.

 

It comes to perch

on a tangle of branches,

 

and suddenly there are many birds.

 

 

 

 

 

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Topics/Categories:

Aging, Birds, free verse, Grief, Life, Narrative, Poetry, Relationships

Genre:

Narrative Poetry

Type of Work:

Poetry

Publishers:

Gold Wake Press

Original Published Source:

www.goldwakepress.org

Original Publish Date:

2008-07-19

Formats:

pdf