Under Towers
By Julie Flanders
The baby bird made its slippery way
Into a life
Fantastic, feather-free
And blind
Ready to speak a tiny mind
Through a small beak
A birdsong of hunger
And desire
In a nest at the top of an urban spire
You say the whole situation is drastic
And the world is headed for disasters
We have never known before
Drought, extinction, death, war
And general mayhem
After this time you say
There may not be an again
The bird doesn’t know when
But opens its baby mouth
For a mother who knows
That one day she will fly south
But for now she is here
In the north
Waiting for the earth to squirm
After a sudden rain
So she can entice a ripe worm
To eternal rest
And flight
In the afterlife of her breast
And eventually in the body of the young singer
In the nest
Is the worm willing to die
In order to one day grow feathers
And fly
Sometimes I get up early and wonder
If I am the worm
Or the bird
Hunting the poem
Hunting the one word
That will dissolve in my mouth
And feed what I create
From my chewed up self
From the life
I masticate
The world is a worm
And I wonder what is coming next
The universe made man
To prove it could
To see its powers flexed
And ignited
Into poets and singers
Into mothers and fathers
And church bell ringers
Still at war
With their bells still tolling
Over lands that bleed oil
And loathing
On the sidewalk today
In front of the church
Where the nest and the bird
And the baby bird find perch
I heard their song
And I almost forgot
That the world is a palace of starlight
And rot
And I finally lost my
Self
In the music I’ve known
In the traffic of
Now
And the comfort of home
October Process 