Building Birds

Images bombard me,

phrases running around in my head

with no place to land

and rest their beautiful words and images,

the jigsaw puzzle

still in pieces on the dining room table,

completion at bay, teasing, waiting

in fragments, refusing

to allow dinner to be served.

Scarlet staccato sunlight,

the sun on summer sorghum,

pathetic puddles lying muddily near raging rivers,

criticizing the flow

from stagnation

ending in evaporation.

These misfit images revolve around my mind,

revising themselves,

circling like hawks,

keen eyes laser focused on the landscape below,

searching for prey, another smaller image

to tear talons into, snatching it up

and carrying it far away, only to smash it

on the ground and devour it,

word by delicious word,

becoming a more complete, more complex bird,

perhaps ready to build a nest,

an aerie atop the most ancient conifer,

a sacred, unstructured sanctuary

composed of sticks, ribbons, straw,

and miscellaneous scraps and threads

of this and that, things you would never

recognize as useful, much less

beautiful,

where other birds will someday

peck their way out of their fragile shells,

fierce, dainty things

with fluffy feathers

and screaming beaks

ignoring the fiddler crabs scurrying away under the jagged wings of gulls.

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https://vocal.media/poets/the-creative-endeavor-unofficial-poetry-challenge