Monday, September 17, 2012

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.