Counter-Currents
107 words
I’d lift my forehead from the book and see
a flock consisting of a billion birds,
like a river in the heavens, three
miles wide, and forty miles in length. My words
never pierced the shadow they cast down.
Born more than eighty years too late, I could
not warn them of the threat of each new town,
of hunters waiting in the underwood.
For hours they were sovereigns to my eyes,
passing over Mercer County. The sun
gilded their feathers in the bloody twilight,
and when they vanished over the horizon
towards Ohio, Michigan, and the night,
what I heard were not coos, only cries.
2005
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2 comments
Wow, nice work. That’s the best contemporary poem I’ve read so far this year. Ghost Dog, Way of the Samurai has some stuff about passenger pigeons, but I’m not sure how the symbolism fits there.
Once we were a race that killed anything that moved. Now, not so much.
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