7.27.2010

some birds eat other birds, or story for the lost artist

A cliff falcon swept her broad wings, and
thefted a newborn chicken-child singing 

pio, pio, pio to a little boy.

Well, throw a rounded stone swiftly,

enough to strike
the hunter. She will
drop the yellow feathered thing.
It will plunge thirty feet, 

lay dead on the grass, dirtied
and damp on the ground,
for the little boy to dash over
in his small feet,
and be afraid to touch it.

You must
pick it up,
the little dead body,
and carry it in the cracked cradle
of your labored hands,
and lay it,
in a grounding-stone grave.


You must take the old bronze bowl,
the one
where grandmother's young fingers
picked her blessed rice from,
when the young farm chickens chirped for her,
and place
the hollowed metal,

on the silent body of the creature.

Take a tarnished spice spoon, heavy
with the rains and cold,
and strike, the empty eating sphere.
It will ring, a knelling clarity,
& sound, into the dozing mountains,
and the cool, grey haze that cloaks them.

You must hit it again,
& again, and then, again, drumming
faster, your fingers,
become chanting monks

of a dead dharmic religion,
a steady, chiming, prayer-voice
soaring up to the blind burying gods,
and the bird will stir.

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