Panic
3:15 on a Friday morning.
The sky a-glimmer with stars and one half-eaten moon
A peach of Allman Brothers or Eliot fame
– Half a life left –
All that has come before, moments savored and lost.
The ruffling of feathers, picking of carrion, soaring on high.
Caw, caw, caw
Thirty minutes in the dead of night.
The useless prayer to ward off the inevitable
reverberates and infiltrates
to the open-windowed innocent below.
3:17 on a Friday morning
Pondering the peculiarity of a crow cawing in darkness.
The frailty and panic and her own half-eaten peach dripping in the starlit sky.
They are the same.
The stillness
the greying
the joy
the loss.
The promise that is now.
A lullaby before drifting off again.
.
Colleen Sohn