Crow sits on sleeping Silverback’s chest,
Daring himself down to broach the hands
Held root-twined tight even at rest,
Cupping a murder’s worth of sand.
His beak seizes on a single grain
And lifts it from the thatch of black.
Silverback sounds out in a dream again,
Swiping paw at the past to push it back,
Clipping the blur now taking wing.
Crow spirals skyward from the glade,
Gliding past the mounted totem rings
That share the sleep in Silver’s shade.
Day’s descending as a blunted blade’s edge,
Calling to cut at Crow’s line of sight.
He makes all the black of himself a wedge
Between the frost-forms making the night
No place for a bird with wings weighted
By the burn of so many, many days.
But no burden keeps him back: Silver hated
Him for this, and from sleep would raise
A cry out of his dreams to wake who else
Shared his sleep beneath the canopy —
At Crow daring not to be as heavy as himself,
And find the high bright a better place to be.
It’s many years yet till Crow will reach
The rocks where he’ll lay his grain down
And dream — this his own — of building a beach,
And yet more time until he turns around,
Barely rested, back to Silverback’s land,
Hoping to hold and haul back but one more
Grain of sand from the still-sleeping hands
Of the only one who knows what he does this for.
August 2010