Flamants Roses

 

 

They are more graceful in thought and name

with beaks as big as their heads

and necks that slacken like ropes

from all the weight of their crustacean bills.

 

Talk has it, in the Camargue the winter before we came,

their little brains froze never thinking to lift their feet

as the circling tides hardened like shackles about their legs.

 

Men came with hammers and chisels

to chip free their feet, ducking like bulls

the furious black and scarlet sweeps

of their matador wings. 

Rose flames, they could not

melt nor dance themselves free, their gawky beaks

clacking, scratching the ice like useless castanets.

 

 

“Flamants Roses” first appeared in The Atlanta Review, where it won an “International Merit Award” in their 1999 International Poetry Competition and has been reprinted in the anthologies The Best of Write Action, and Liaisons II: the R.D. Lawrence Commemorative Anthology.

 

_____________________________

 

the thing about snow is

that it falls like a soft flock

of small birds of prey

 

with wings too little

to see the fluttering

of their back-flapping

as each flake brakes to land

 

on the bald head of the man

who walks in front of me

who’s never seen a hawk

(or an owl) and can’t imagine

 

nature’s little savageries

descending as anything

but the soft cold talons of snow

 

 

 

© 2008 Tim Mayo