Poetry: Kin

Kin 

In the evenings,
we walked to the soft silver pines,
tucking tufts and wisps into the branches
for the winged convocations
of the downy-wise — to covet,
to be taken up into the mysteries,
woven with leaves & lichen,
moss, feathers, twigs,
spun silk: entwined.

My grandmother wore her hair
in a swirl above her head —
a yellow lily resting on a pond,
and we never saw a frog hop out,
but in the springtime,
it was an ever-present possibility:
a small amphibian might appear,
viridian as a river rock,
to sit and sing to the moon.

If a song thrush thatched
a hermitage, a peasant’s castle
in the knotted boughs of the old crabapple,
or if a chiffchaff overwintered in my braid,
then I could learn the avian folkways,
knowing when my feathered kin
was jubilant or tired, and needed rest
from prophesying;

Whole ecologies would branch and bloom
around us: orchards swirling,
a braided nest.

Published in Heimat Review, January 2023