These stories
Tell themselves
Between crows and ravens
In songs their forebears told,
Before murders made malice
For farmers rowing food
For their families,
Birds bid their broods sleep
With tales of
Favored feathers and fanciful flights.
Soaring slumberers
With wingspans wide as wolves,
Whose swoop swings with substance,
Not the harried arcs of hummingbirds
Fighting for footing in the air
By beating tirelessly
Against the pull of the earth
With brittle bones that
Barely sustain them,
Ever hungry,
Guzzling nectar in
As much as they can,
Uncertain when the next meal will come.
Sustainence in a song
The salutation and
The severance,
The jury of Corvus
Pecking at a storyteller
Misspoken,
Some sacrifice for separating
Sacred from base,
Holy from the mundane,
Hallow from the hollow,
Some fistful of shiny words
That will not make
A substantial nest.
An Oral Carload 