Tue Cent Twosday: Bird, a Poem
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| Image from Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons free license. |
Bird.
I see you, bird. Black feathers. Shiny.
Beak. Black beak like jet, hard and grooved along the length.
It’s longer than I expected. Long and sharp.
“Once there was food here.” Tatiana Tolstaya.
The forest. Mass graves, running for miles, between trees.
I like trees. I don’t feel death when I’m in the trees.
Death is probably there, I mean, it has to be.
Death is everywhere. That’s the whole point.
But in trees, the sense of life overwhelms all that.
I think that’s why I liked hiking so much.
Outside the reach of her voice.
Stay where you can hear me.
God, that used to piss me off.
I’d push at it, silently, in my stomach.
The ulcers are a reaction to using magic, I think.
Maybe it’s improper grounding. I wonder.
But birds are hard to find in trees.
My father said he’d piss off the other people in the Sierra Club.
He’d find the birds faster than anyone else.
He was smug about it, too, which I think is part of the problem.
If not all of the problem.
Meat hook on your face, bird. Weapon. Knife.
Are you carnivorous? You’d have to be, with that beak.
We didn’t have crows in that forest.
Stellar jays. Nasty birds, steal other birds’ nests.
But no crows. Maybe ravens, though I don’t remember them.
I saw a crow at the zoo. He was enormous. Pretty, but huge.
Not a wimpy bird.
Birds in England sound different than birds here.
How many different varieties of crows are there?