Three Ravens Watch
        after Winter Landscape with Skaters and Bird Traps,
                                Pieter Bruegel, 1565

If you were a smooth, shiny circle, we would collect
you for our nests, but your bodies shuffle mindlessly
back and forth. You forget when the ice was thin, when
many of you fell through, trapped underneath.

This harshest winter attracts you to skate, to forget
your misery, scrawling patterns in ice. Ravens,
three of us, stand sentinel, noticing
your slow-witted motions, your clumsy sprawls.

From our high perch, we witness eerie cries of brothers
and sisters lured inside your net strung across the trees.
We hear them crash to the bottom, caught on the great awl,
entangled in the glistening awfulness, your web.

Do not forget, you who now skate, that you will return
to your endless winter, bread riots, witch
hunts, old widowed women targeted, and frozen birds
falling from the sky. We know that you want to eat us.

Snow fell in July; men froze to death in September.
Grapes for wine would not ripen. Parasites thrived under
snow and destroyed your crops. You carry your corpses
in carts; your dead litter the ground in rough cloth shrouds.

Branches extend over ice, harbingers of death;
we know that you want to eat us. You also believe
witches cause livestock epidemics, make cows stop
giving milk, create early frosts, and all the unknown

diseases; witch trials can stop bad weather. Ye griping
trappe made of yrne, the lowest barre and the hoope with
two clickets, the devil scourge of all the earth. Remember
ice will again be as thin as this diffused light.

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Copyright © 2022 Margo Taft Stever All rights reserved
from The End of Horses
Broadstone Books
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission