Tuesday Poem: an earlier version published in Claiming The Spirit Within: A Sourcebook of Women's Poetry in 1994

What Saved Her

                                     

When they were napping,

she discovered she could

grow feathers at will, so black,

they shone like a mirror, fanning out

as she stretched her wings,

and a beak hard and sharp

as a pencil point, to peck at the glass

that kept her out of the fields she could see,

                                    

and without so much as a look back

at their golden heads damp with dreams,

she was out and flying to the others,

clustered dark and narrow-shouldered

on limbs, on fences, chilling the air with their fury.

   

She could watch herself: claws

tearing at flesh, caws, loud and raucous,

hers and theirs, a chorus of dry stalks,

carrion erasing everything:

the white bones picked

clean and catching light.