These Birds Walk
“Dear god—I miss falling asleep with my brothers and sisters. It was so much fun……what do you want me to do.”—Omar, boy in Pakistan, from “These Birds Walk”
It began when I braved the light
And stumbled toward the protective lattice webbing the door
And I slipped like a kite string in the sky
Through the iris of metal and grating—
Open rigged there long ago by our protectors
Tarnished by time and sweltering, high-mountain heat
And I found the field past the house walls and then beyond that
The sea.
And once through, I ran
And I leapt homeward so fast I’d not known my legs could map such a distance
So fleet and so far and so young, as if flight
Until I reached toward an outer-bridge and the waves,
The waves scattering themselves upon the glass buoys and the fisherman’s oats and The circling of my once unanswered prayers
Until I tasted the wind and chalk-line fingertip of something reaching and
There it was:
Space written on the world as if my own.
And I was free.
And later in the night, I swallowed in gulps oxygen and dream and mama’s voice
And my heart unbuckled
And I knew then, it must be,
It was, ineluctably,
You.
We were in flight and we were going and we were free, all because of
The waves and the slight and singular
You.
For: Omar Mullick and his sons.
