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Dark Poetry #4

112

JenniferMaxwell

Member Elite

since 2006-09-14

Posts 2423

0 posted 2008-12-10 08:58 AM

I’d forgotten about them until just now when
reading in Longley’s Music Box the line about
the man who kept canaries under his roof.
Then the image came back of the small
yellow birds you kept in a cage hung
on a hook too high for my small hands
to reach and unlatch the door
that would set them free.
They didn’t live very long, perhaps it
was the oven gas or the smoke from his
cigars that did them in. But you never
gave up, as soon as one moved into a match
or shoe box, you brought home another
and tried to teach it to sing
while he was gone and couldn’t mock
your need for their song to silence the roar
of darkness closing in.
Your birds are stone, the darkness won
and now follows me. My hands are still
too small to unlatch the door but my window
frames the flight of starlings, rooks, and gulls
that lead me back to april grass and the sea.

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