Theresa Williams
xiv. bird meditation, 17 september
dear guido,
what is your first thought when i say … bird.
so many think of freedom first, beauty, the gentleness of a dove. they don t think, do they, of the hawk s bloody beak, the black crow, or the butcher bird impaling prey on barbed wire.
jung painted himself as an old man with feathered wings, dark and ominous, like a raptor s. this image keeps arriving to me on cards through the u.s. mail, came again today, along with ads for rooter and family services. we survive, somehow, the butchers and the hawks.
we survive the broken things, pipes and marriages, sewage that comes again to remind us of our humanness.
a broken thing is a broken thing, we naturally say, and not a possibility.
–bird meditation, 17 september is part xiv of a prose poem collection called the eternal network
Theresa Williams has poems published or forthcoming in a number of magazines, including Rufous City Review, qarrtsiluni, Infinity’s Kitchen, Ink, Sweat, & Tears, Barnwood, Gargoyle, and Paterson Literary Review. She has a chapbook coming out with Finishing Line Press which was a finalist for their New Women’s Voices Prize. In addition, she has several stories published and a novel, The Secret of Hurricanes, which was a finalist for the Paterson Fiction Prize.
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