BY MICHAEL BROSNAN

Day Birds at Night

A new moon, thumbed out.

Low, plundering clouds.

The dim night dimmed darker.

We see the trail by looking

away from it ever so slightly.

As with love.

Here, a half-mile deep,

you’ve taken me to witness

the wild language of stillness,

teach me how the unspooling world

must idle back, recharge the will.

In the canopy of trees

and in the fallen, matted leaves

sleep those earth-tone day birds,

their minikin hearts idling,

beaks tucked under wings,

riding out the dark turn of Earth.

Why, I wonder, is it so hard

to stay awake to this thrum,

to not numb to amazement,

as if any of this — you, me,

the stippling reach of each tree,

the evolving of hope into varied wing

and song, and this wild need of stillness —

could ever be ordinary?

Our Overburden

Coal gave birth to Lindytown.

Then the appetite for bituminous black

took the town back —

the houses, the school, the general store,

the post office, the bar and grill,

the Twilight Church of God,

the roll of the rolling landscape

(the company calls it the overburden) where

the wild had so many sensate rhythms,

where breathing was, once, simply, breathing.

Everywhere: God’s country.

Gone.

The angel of misaligned love washes

her sooted wings in a mountain stream.

The scrubbing only

makes things worse.

Michael Brosnan’s most recent poetry book is The Sovereignty of the Accidental (Harbor Mountain Press, 2018). His poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Rattle, Confrontation, Borderlands, Prairie Schooner, Barrow Street, New Letters, and The Moth. He lives in Exeter, New Hampshire.

Process Note: Many of my poems, like these two, rise out of questions I have about the world. What do birds think about the world at night? How does it feel to live in a town destroyed by capitalist greed? Then I try to build a poem — word by word, line by line —that resonates in the mind and heart.