Forgotten Ground Regained
The Birds of Ancient Battlefields Visit the Suburbs
In the nodding midday, a murder of crows.
So loud they haul you · from a lulled house
where news of a war · nests in the walls.
You stare to the end · of the street where they roost
not in the maples · on mowed lawns,
carefully straighted-edged, calm, but the stripped
crown of an elm · dying of canker:
The flapping rags · of their funeral clothes.
The air-wrung cries. The creature they rail at
(you think, squinting · at its backlit squat)
is a cat, hunched hard · against the havoc,
harried, But how, so improbably high,
has it ghosted there · to that grim resistance?
Your neck hairs bristle · in a thin breeze.
Your shoulders rise. Now, from the riot
of mobbed clamor, the muddying cat-shape
grows great wings. It glides away,
owl after all, soundless, awful,
a soul departing · the place of slaughter.
The din dies down. Occasional cawing.
Quiet. The carrion · far away.
Copyright © Maryann Corbett, 2013
(reprinted in Forgotten Ground Regained, New Series, Issue 5, Winter, 2025; previously publilshed in Breath Control and before that, in The Raintown Review
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