Shell-born,

Every chick is a raptor Venus

Hatched, blind and bleeding

From a whirlpool of straw and feather,

Interweaving.

 

The salty sea of the amniotic sac

Glazes our shell-pink, alien limbs

As we crack, trembling and radiant,

Into life, to rest upon eggshell carnage,

Spent, our panting like so many hymns

To the oak in whose arms we lie —

The oak, true husband of the mother-bird.

 

She, in graceful homage

Will weave through His branches.

The whisper of her wing-wind spells worship.

The tremors of her feathered throat —

Tap your smallest finger —

Such is her frail movement

As she croons crying in the night.

(We forgive you, Mother.)

 

Soon,

Like angry petals,

We fall wings flapping,

Parched with an open-air thirst

Born of egg-shell claustrophobia.

We tumble into the sky

To the rustling of sapling clapping

And sweet autumn stink.

Their leaves blush too, with pride.

 

Anne Clark