by Cheryl Martone
One crow swoops down from his solo perch,
beholds a lifeless body of another. His sudden
voice nudges indifferent dawn, grates the air.
Sky stretches and shifts, grows rich with color,
streaked with wings. This is no Van Gogh sky,
though. No wheatfields here. And yet, a sweep
of nature’s gestures,
menace on the horizon,
a certain madness in the air, and now—in my
own backyard—a community moved by and
within a murder of its own. Crows pace, scan,
echo each other. Somehow, they must know
how mythologies persist about them: trickster,
thief. Something to dread. But when I look
below my own window,
I don’t see anything
worse than small creatures born with intent
to survive. Everywhere, it seems, some kind
of danger, another funeral. Old lamentations,
new ones not yet imagined. Eventually, each
bird lifts away, leaves one soul behind. They,
and I, begin this day acknowledging another
passing, another unease
beyond Equinox. Soon,
All Souls Day. And days later, the millions
of votes cast. Dies cast. But now, it’s still
October, the shorter days, human silhouettes
moving within the windows of their lives –
within a daily exorbitance of
whatever’s next.
Is it this ticking brightness? Some take it all in.
Some resist. Others look down and away. Sky
anchors in cobalt, erases this dawn reflection
of our autumn world riddled with fire.
Cheryl Martone lives in Rhode Island, where she works as a grant writer for a food rescue and hunger relief nonprofit. Her work has been published in Still Point Arts Quarterly, River Heron Review, Gyroscope Review, Drifting Sands Haibun, Yellow Arrow Journal, and Unlost, among other publications.
