Winter Refuge
The branch the bird left still shakes.
The shaking agitates
A cluster of forgotten leaves,
These fall.
Sense tells us it was a bird
Although we do not see.
The haughty snort, some call
A cough, of dead leaves
On wet earth twenty yards off
Is an urgency of disbelief,
A freeze-dried flake of helium
Balloon against the celebratory
Noise of another hemisphere …
Soon a woman and child
Arrive. The branch, silent.
Stooping, as if peering into a pool,
Waiting for a millipede to hump through
They will notice in a leaf
The dried blood of a lion,
Penelope’s unravelled weave.
And the boy disintegrates as he grasps
So obviously a home;
So bird-barren solemn,
Caught, which is to say uplifted
In the rare light of a tongue of wilderness.
Glenn McPherson