You simply have to be here
to hear, yes, also to listen,
to the music of what happens
overlapping this sound world.
But every day we are busy
making the world more silent,
of any other voices not con-
nected to the air wave info,
except for the mercenary rush
roaring just the other side of this
oriole singing creek trickle last stand
of woods enduring below freeway hurry,
reminding we are never content
to be rooted — we must keep moving.
In this way we are the passenger
pigeon, the last of which flew into
extinction somewhere over Ohio,
stuffed in a museum in Cincinnati.
Ah, listen closer, you can still hear
its last wing beat waving good bye
to us who believe we will go on forever.
—
Ray McNiece is the author of eleven books of poems and monologues most recently Bone Key Sutra, Love Song for Cleveland, and Breath Burns Away, New Haiku (Red Giant Press, 2019). From 2020 to 2023, he served as the Poet Laureate of Cleveland Heights. He received the Cleveland Arts Prize Lifetime Achievement Award in 2021. In 2022, he was awarded a $50,000 Poet Laureate Grant from the American Academy of Poetry for his Poem for Cleveland Project. www.raymcniece.com.
