homing pigeons competing in an annual race were released in Lyon,
France for a destination in Brussels, Belgium. Unlike previous
races, only a few of the pigeons arrived.)
Each generation
fantasy birds visit earth
Mozart knew them,
so did Freud
For those who will listen
they tell stories yet unwritten,
transcribe testimony to the paradoxes
of existence
Revolutionaries shrill their slogans,
cannibals and cardinals
intone their forbidden canticles.
They dust sunsets with beatific visions
Now they are scattered over Europe,
lost in a nuclear storm,
the cord to intuition
clipped in the wisp of a millisecond
They sit dazed in the pine forests,
beaks ajar
like tiny children beaten for laughing
An official inquiry has concluded:
“Many questions still abound” I want to know
what exhortation they carried,
how they will go back,
whether their eyes have grown narrow or wide,
if they feel as I did:
a boy falling backward
off a porch into a spreader bush,
hearing the laughter of aunts and uncles,
my mother saying, “You’ll be all right”
Already I had entered
the unremitting dark