Black Bird.

While taking the trash out today, I found a black bird on the ground.

It was dead.

It had been for at least a week now.

Ants coiled around its body,

taking bits of flesh

until I could see through its egg-white skull.

Its one raised leg was contorted,

like a scraggly twig stabbed on by a child.

I stared at it.

Deciphering how it died.

On a necklace of white feathers,

I could see a blotch of red;

was it blood from a fight wound?

Was it merely accidental,

a spillage from the ants’ scavenging?

Or was it caused by the neighbour’s elusive Siamese?

Did its wings falter? Did it fall from the sky,

heart thumping,

a feeling it could not describe rising through its throat -

a feeling so primal it knew it -

a feeling we call ‘fear’?

Did it yearn for its mother during those last shakes?

Did it cry, sputtering,

spasming on the summer-hot concrete of our driveway?

The cicadas screamed;

screamed their eulogies;

screamed their summer requiems.

They screamed then stopped. Then screamed again.

The bird did not have eyes anymore

but it was looking at me, socketless,

trying to break through the membrane that separates

the Dead from the Living,

trying to be reborn.

It pulled at the wind.

Its feathers bristled.

For a moment, it was alive,

beak opened as if it would croak once more.

I watched it for a little longer,

but the bird had been emptied;

no lungs, no throat,

no breath for even a hum.

It laid there, a silent, fallen carrion.

If there was something to be said,

if it had crawled under my window

to signify some terrible prophecy,

I couldn’t wait around any longer.

There were things to be done.

The trash had to be thrown out.

(I wouldn’t have wanted to hear what it had to say anyway.

The dead knew the inside of my brain too well.)

Written by By Josephyn M.