Photography And Half-Thoughts By Mitchell Hegman

...because some of it is pretty and some of it is not.

Sunday, April 11, 2010

Sorrow and Bird

In sharp flames, like knives gnashing
he burned the stiffened bluebird
he’d found crumpled at the lilac’s toe.
In life and in death
he’d always imagined more possibilities,
a prettier aster under the dulling cellophane,
love not a vine, but a wick running deep.

Why shouldn’t men flap their arms and fly?
Why not birds riding red bikes
or moo-cows raking the fallen leaves?
And the world, he assumed,
would do as well flat as round,
given that you must travel so far removed
to make any sense of the shape.
What use a circle, a globe, a whole planet
when you can stand only on a single flat place
at any given time?

Of what use death
if you cannot be alive as well?

Basketed in weaves of quackgrass and knapweed,
fuming, smoldering,
the bird’s wings pulled into tinseled fists—
closing, closing,
just before erupting brightly,
a new thing, ephemeral.
A new thing.

--Mitchell Hegman

1 comment:

  1. LOVE - LOVE - LOVE your poetry! My favorite line is "Of what use is death if you cannot be alive as well"? I live by this idea. Why stay in the "safe" zone your whole life. That to me is NOT living! Great accomplishments come from great "failures"! Fly little bird ... ride that red bike ... feel the wind ... live.

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