Virgil on Main Street: Dreams of War

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These crows are gifted children,
living jewels riding the white air
as an inversion of the flames
they portend. Three are carrion
angels hung in the limp heart
of a late-winter tree, settling
in ominous convocation
as a singular omen of chaos
in the shuddering space
where the sky fucks the earth,
the earth too tired in March
to fuck back, only the energy to lie still
bleeding black from every orifice.

Her pelvic curvature sinks, brittle,
as an infant skull pushes
to the surface to say nothing
in a thousand dialects, to speak
the only truth on the twisted doorstep
of spring among stones and ice,
in strangled syllables collapsed
in an invisible throat. That silence
wakes me and I listen to the wind
in the eaves and the shrill humming
of night, the mantra of all the dead,
the only protest they can manage
even as the choir swells.