Stunning poem by Jacar Press own Chera Miller And you can hear her read it at the link. SPARROWS The birds are always a surprise, the way they dart among the airy metal trusses and peer at the shoppers, tilting their heads with worry, as if we could reach them that high up. You can’t help but wonder how they survive with everything packaged and put away, what door they came in through, or if they will make it back out. It’s hard to think that the sparrows in the cereal aisle, waiting for a spill, can slowly starve. That the janitors will scoop their still-warm bodies into bins, quickly, during the empty nights, when nobody sees. Really, this place is full of undoings that people don’t usually notice, the things we put in our carts that used to be living, but more too, the employees who wonder how to pay rent, the relationships quietly unraveling, couples not speaking, grandparents slowly leaving lonely houses less and less at a time, the children already starting to undo their parents, getting farther and farther away from them in the aisles, some of them, and you can see that eventually they’ll get out of reach completely. Still, the shot surprises us. The thought of it, an opening mouth that was just beginning to say No. Because this morning, like us, she might have watched the dark-eyed juncos scratching for seeds in the snow, bright and delighted. Because she awoke like us and dressed, because she ate breakfast, and her life, like ours, was just as it had been every other day, something from before that carries over with us, and something else always just about to begin. rattle/poetry/sparrows-by-chera-hammons/
Posted on: Mon, 05 Jan 2015 00:36:37 +0000
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