This time we find graveyard feathers.
Someone’s spirit is alight.
Someone’s fallen from the night.
Someone flashes into remembrance.
Someone borrows plumes.
Someone wears a feather crown.
Someone shakes the snow.
Someone whistles through bone.
Someone settles into flight.
This time we find graveyard feathers.
Month: September 2017
Migrations
for my son
Several winter storms broke off
the southern point like a finger of ice,
though Lake Erie’s waves dredge up
the lakebed and resuspend a shoreline.
Last year there was a marsh fire
that burned to its reflection.
This year the reeds and cattails
are born of ash and water.
Didn’t our bird sightings migrate,
the book of native plants grow wild,
the binoculars sprout antlers
and gaze back into us like a forest.
Whenever we return to the park
distance folds time into waves,
like any transoceanic migration
that erases its own path– we are here.
Solar Eclipse
The dead can look at the eclipse.
I stand with my back to the sun,
a shoebox viewer and pinhole
for the shadow play in miniature.
The moon crept across the sun
as though God were inserting
a nucleus into a cell, implanting
renewable energy in the solar engine.
My dead brother wept for the light,
while our loving mother,
radiant through darkness,
offered solace to her dead sons.
At the limits of lunar mass,
trans-elementation complete,
vultures lift off the sun’s rim
as though from the tree of life.
Salvatore Ala 