Say it's not true: it's not
because you'd arrived in the field after harvest

that the murder of crows left
flocking into the graveyard.

Say it like it's always true. Say it.
Say it, Momma: the birds left for the best of worms.

Say something else. Say you are not
alone with them, like the dead

always leaving everything lonely. Behind, if nothing else but
a window in the wind, in the night

colors swaying in the bamboo, in the soft nest
hatched in comfort

in blindness (all that it has ever known
in its short life), not in the long

drawn-out night clutching hunger
born like stars thrust

to stomach the empty sky
emptying; not in the dark hollow, as precarious as a hatchling

deposit is to glean through a worm's hole
the blur of the bamboo

in the wind, in the sound of lift and flight and landing
strikes like sticks music the head bones.