Hundreds of Thousands of Migratory Birds ‘Falling Out of the Sky’
-EcoWatch Headline, September 16, 2020
I
They say we nose-dived into the earth mid-flight,
flycatchers, swallows, warblers,
falling out of the sky by the thousands.
Just last week we were singing our call and response,
now we are a prayer dying in someone’s mouth.
II
When I flew from the nest everything was lift and thrust,
my migration path unfolding like an ancestral map.
I follow the land beneath me by the texture of light
gathering the fields. I move across the sky like a small god.
III
It’s not how we intended to leave the world
though the light was just right, burning the edges
of cottonwood and maple, fields of color beneath us,
green becoming blue becoming endless sky.
IV
Some call me Wildfire. Some call me Apocalypse.
A sputtering constellation of weight and drag,
beak and bone. Wing by wing,
we are little feathered griefs
scattered across the landscape.
Perhaps it’s all the sky can hold.
The Four Stages of Flight
Sharon Venezio is the author of The Silence of Doorways (March 2013, Moon Tide Press). Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including the New York Quarterly, Grew Sparrow, Spillway, Bellevue Literary Review, and elsewhere. She is currently working on a poetry manuscript about dementia.