Produced by Maine Poetry Central and Dennis Camire
This week’s poem is by Marita O’Neill. Her most recent book is “Evidence of Light,” published by Moon Pie Press.
Brown Nest with Blue Egg
By Marita O’Neill
I.
Knocking us back on our couch, fragments
of news: marble and stone billow into clouds
of dust in Mosul where the men, sledgehammers
in hand, straddle the white pillars of winged
bulls, Nineveh’s gatekeepers, and swing
and swing until the cracks spread like smiles
while something ancient shatters and tumbles,
pale as marble, onto the rug by our slippers.
II.
In the thorny brambles of early spring,
she finds the nest still holding the shell
of a blue egg, light as a voice, fragile
as her own, which she thought she lost
in the hurly burly of winter. Does it prove
the perseverance of order, this tiny thing
held in a circle of branches, milkweed,
and plastic bags? And what of this circle
needled together by a tiny laborer to hold
and protect the city of our imaginations?
Who will keep Nineveh when
the walls collapse, when the voices
are lost in the dust of our history books?
Who will keep her own voice, round
and blue as a sky, if not herself?
She feels the weight of the weaving
in her palm, admires its workmanship
sturdy and small as the stones of a
church not so easily turned to ruin.
Dennis Camire can be reached at denniscamire@hotmail.com
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