Crow

 

Crow spreads his sure, silken wings

and enfolds the child

with the blue moon eyes

and rests there, holding

the infant in his embrace

offers her sweet plump fig

in memory of the departed

to comfort the child

and to draw from her red skin

the ache feeding on her lungs

but the fruit remains unseen

begins to decay in the bellows within

and crow departs, returns

bearing fat wine-coloured grapes

and golden peaches

while the child, laced in white socks

and perfectly-pleated tartan

rejects the fruit, starves

in the gaze of her wasteland, drawing

rings around her disguise

and a thousand moons blaze

while crow revisits, again, and again

to nest in the murky water

of the decaying, layered deposits of her lungs

while the compost grows a scar

and rotations of sun beget a woman

handcuffed to blisters, shrivelled

dry, a walking desert

as crow’s faithfulness shifts

to picking at the bloodied organ of her heart

she cries in outrage

her stubborn courage clothed inflexibly

in darkness and shame

while crow proceeds to devour her

from the inside out

 clinging to the metal scaffolding

of enslavement, cold

and rigid as a mountain

 she stands firm,

voting instead for the familiar cheap seats

until one day she stares back into

the womb of crow’s earnest black eyes

and sees pleading, praying,

a pilgrimage to the kernel

of the dripping emerald forest

like the landscape of her heart

its carpet, moist and chaotic

she has endured

surviving the howling tempests

that crush and raze with fury

an identity, a woodland, 

fluid and open, free

and unshackled by dark dishonour

nourished by networks of tall tree friends

clad in contours of breathing green

she wakes, 

 while crow takes flight

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