Time will never Tell

With these hands
I have cradled the past.
With these hands
I have buried memories.
With these hands,
still-lined with life,
callused by death,
I grasp air in my palm
and feel it trapped there
squirming in a fist.

With these hands
I held my babies-once, long ago-
now forbidden to touch
With the same such tender care.

With these hands
I sealed my ancestors in dirt
now sealed away from all five senses.

With these hands,
I make words
that lose their matter while gaining typeface.
I multiply my meaning only to divide
by the given definition of what it is
To pen or poem.

With these hands,
I scratch the wet shoreline,
I was here
With these hands.
I open my palms
erasing my place

just in Time.


Image by By DashaVZ (Own work) [CC0], via Wikimedia Commons.

Cockcrow of the crows and a cockatoo

There are city dwelling birds

that are not your common stool pigeons.

The ravens occupy the east

side of the tracks.

The gulls guard the windy west.

On garbage day they all rise early

not for worms in the green box holes-

they know the small fries

are at the bottom of paper bags.

We had a murder

before our pine tree was felled

from illness. Yet, like serial flyers,

they moved to another pine,

preferring needles and sap

to the plethora of palms;

mexican fan, kintia, canary, 

the King and Queen and the Phoenix.

The ravens also get dates,

taking them out to 

happening intersections

and drop them so they 

get cracked by cars,
rolling through

while the fair gulls glide along

bellies filled with stale soft bread-

And I remember good old Fred.

Taken in and taught by those

crows

how to

blend in seamlessly-though he's a cockatoo.

They fly as one flock

rise and cockcrow,

the gulls sneer and squawk.

The city birds are not blind

deaf or dumb, 

winged with wayward choice

The murder

doesn't mind

one more white bird

or a cock or two. 

Image By Liftarn (Traced from Image:Odin's ravens right.PNG) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.