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.