―to Martha, the last passenger pigeon
Easy prey, your kind. I imagine a massive brace of birds dimming
the daylight―thousands shaped as iridescent cloud, as specter.
The air must have vibrated with your kee-kee-kee, your mating bells.
I wish I could have stood, stock-still with the crowd, staring up,
astonished by your communal wheeling from tree to sky, sky
to roost, to sky again. Hunters need only have pointed their rifles
skyward.
Captured and caged when your numbers were reduced to three,
then two. A metal roof your sky. After your mate died, only you
on display at the Cincinnati Zoo. I like to think, after your 29 years,
you joined your flock on the other side of the sky in wild and endless
flight.
—
Barbara Sabol lives in Akron, Ohio, close to the Cuyahoga Valley National Park, whose trails she knows by heart. She was named Ohio Co-Poet of the Year for her sixth book, Watermark: Poems of the Great Johnstown Flood of 1889 (Alternating Current Press, 2023.) Other honors include an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council. Her forthcoming book, Mapping the Borderlands: Haibun and Tanka Prose, is forthcoming from Sheila-Na-Gig Editions in 2025.
