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

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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,

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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

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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

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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?

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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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