Bird and Storm.
There was a place of lonesome days.
There, the days were unchanging, one the same after the other.
There, a bird flew low, her abdomen almost touching the ground.
Her feathers had become marred, tattered from skating across rough earth, edged in frayed silk.
(She cried and trilled, until no animal in the forest could distinguish her joy from her trouble. The melody in her music had bled out.)
She stopped, else broken to fly, landing upon mulched and coarse grasses.
The forest floor, loam, dark, all was—Crack! the light flung through the trees!
The light illuminating a starless sky, from beginning to end, the light washing white the grasslands.
The bird’s heart beat fast, painfully within her breast. She tucked her head under a bent and broken wing, on tenterhooks.
(This was a surprise. No trembling in the earth’s floor, no mist in the air had prophesied a Storm.)
The bolt thundered down, voltage-bearing and alive, harsh.
Revealing rays sparked a fire, burning a path through the forest:
Just there, a new-formed corridor, pristine, unwalked, waiting for her steps.
Storm/lightening fostering light. Storm, a welcome rain.
(The little bird opened one eye from behind feathers. All daylight, everywhere, and a lyric hovered in the spray.)
###
mary june brown 