Free Verse
Crows*
i
Resisting rising from bed this gray morning.
A cow lowing lulls me. A crow's short bark
disturbs my rest.
At dusk one crow comes,
then another, then a flock gathers in the poplars.
They have easten frogs. They tasted
duck eggs. They savor carrion, laughing.
ii
Send the crows to Bosnia, Somalia, Rwanda!
Refugee camps in Zaire overlow with cholera.
A young girl rolls her brother's body in a reed mat.
A once dignified man cannot hide his shit-stained pants.
The young woman every young man desired dies in the night.
The young man who turned heads when he walked down the street
averts his eyhes as he lays desiccated at your feet.
The man who cut the throat of his neighbor's
daughter rattles his own bones.
iii
An old couple hear. They peer at the rock covered
with skeletons living and dead, tattered flesh barely
clinging to bone in this killing field.
Their arms
bruised with small calligraphy. They turn away.
They climb the mountain.
On the radio they call for help.
They seek solace in burning brush
from the smell of ammonia poured over dead bodies
and the too familiar sound of bullsdozers.
They try but cannot cry enough tears
for the thirsty millions.
iv
With the muffler gone from my old Ford tractor
I drive up to where the crows call.
It's open season. I could shoot them,
had I brought my shotgun.
The beast under me roars as its wheels dig
into the raw earth. The tractor submerges;
I hang onto its seat with everything. It takes
me down, down into the gravel left by glaciers,
down through the rock, through the hot mantel,
the liquid core--
out the scabbed crust.
I am on a mountain
covered with skeletons,
rotten flesh. I stop breathing
to stop the stink.
I have arrived
too late.
