Clade Song 6

Borough Bird

This electric pole has served me long enough.
Edging from the cold wire, there is only rage,
Blue-barked, bright-eyed, the mere mention of all that has passed
Enough to tear the wind. And still, the grandness of rage,
With its way of enlarging things. I’ve swollen to the size of a house.
My anger makes me young again, restless.
How can I express to you the truth, or what it becomes,
After years of stubborn refusal, the river half-frozen, our homes, destroyed?

With my four-chambered heart, I have known longing,
My brood, abundance in turmoil, everything enough in the having.
I know better now. The young, they fly—
Thoughtless, heartless, in the pursuit of dust.
I pity the young. They do not know yet that the journey is everything;
From the branch to the bath’s stone lip,
The slow crawl of the ice over the surface is worth breaking.
When the moon appears, I wait the darkness through.
Cars pass with their cruel lights. Night falls like a harsh word.
My song the rebuttal.

Meghan Sterling is a poet, writer and writing teacher living in Asheville, North Carolina with her husband and cat. She says, “My work tends to focus on ambivalence: the difficulty in choosing a path, the beauty of decay, aging, loss. One hand taking while the other gives. Sometimes I write from a woman’s perspective, sometimes a child’s, sometimes a bird’s; but truly, no matter whose eyes I am staring out from as I craft a poem, I am looking around at the world, overwhelmed with the heartbreak I see. And the only way I have learned to deal with heartbreak, is to write my way through.”
Sterling’s work has been featured or is forthcoming in WNC-Women, Allegro Poetry Magazine, Clementine Poetry Journal, the Chronogram, Stone River Review, and Freshwater.