Bird's Home -

It is almost the end of national poetry month. I can't believe I haven't mentioned it earlier. While I was away from home I had a few pleasures and one was a poetry class where I got to immerse myself in some wonderful poetry and write some too. Here is a recent finish.

Bird's Home
by Felice Austin



Bird’s new home is
In the chest cavity
Of a corpse

There is plenty of room there
The ribcage opens to the west
And a nice view of the sunset

Nestled where the heart was
Sometimes she fancies she can hear it
Still beating. Or perhaps it is the rhythm

Of the universe
Her own heart beat is so much faster
Than this slow steady rhythm

When she lays her eggs, her children
Will think the heart beat is their father.

Sometimes she reads the hieroglyphics
Carved on the inside of the bones
Even maggots are artists

There are still a few scraps of
Threadbare clothing on the corpse
That shield her from wind

Bird sings happily that her nest is the best.
She has decorated it with string, scraps of
Poetry, shiny papers

She has strung them across the clavicle
Like a row of colored flags on
Dia De Los Muertos

There is hair on the corpse
Which has many uses
The carrion eaters have carried away everything else

The liver is gone
So is success, happiness,
Identity as man or woman

No longer will this mortal
Struggle to cover its nakedness
In exposure comes beauty

It is mostly skeleton now, though
Strange pieces of it have been preserved,
Petrified in the desert climate,
Things no one believed existed:

All the watermelon seeds ever swallowed.
Benign tumors that are now
Growing strange beautiful flowers
A knee cap

A tattoo, shriveled
Like an abandoned flag
She uses as a rug in her nest

By summer, 4 chicks sing happy songs too,
And heirloom watermelons grow
all over the meadow.

Comments

Popular Posts