Blood Thirst

We are the broken homing pigeons, carrying all
our backs will bear, wings held wide and open,
mothers rising over the flat rooftops of cities,
caught in the smoking, spinning tails of jets,
our stars: the spark of metal
splitting stars apart.

                             Over Lockerbie, daughters drop
in rainfall, the turning, drying, noonday dust swallows
what breaks, watch face, crystal, the glint, clean light
of grass touched by glass. Who stoops to sort the stone
from bone knows in the brambles what will not go away:
the sudden lurching flash of light, night becoming liquid
day, nothing ever is the same, broken, broken.

To loosen the bands around our legs, dull
the keen scent of what it is that draws us,
blood to blood, over mountains and oceans,
a black weight thickening in the pit of our gullets,
mother beaks leaning into the wind. What unknown hands
will take from us and make of us, our splayed feathers
cannot acknowledge, blood thirst burns beneath our tongues;
hungry for our own, we will circle forever the night sky,
under our breasts, our hearts, the knots of muscle darkening.

(Previously published in Hungry As We Are: An Anthology of Washington Area Poets; Washington Writers Publishing House, 1995)