Today's poem is by Katherine Soniat

Branches of Birds, Kingdoms That Float
       

Owl asleep in a willow while the child sits on the levee
with her storybook.    O*W*L makes that windy OWELL

noise—night bird's name she scratches in the dirt
with a stick. Branches of Birds: Kingdoms That Float,

her favorite book the year she turns seven. For Tink,
1925, inked in silver on the black page. Almost good

enough to eat—that book with a fat gold moon painted
among bare branches. Her cat, Gray, will want to hear

more about that, even if he never listens when she reads
to him. And any day now, a raft is coming down-river for her,

and whatever else wants to get aboard.         No one can go
home for supper.         The river is there for her daily, but

in bed at night she gets mixed up and starts to miss not
having a mother—the person they tell her    "died right

after she was born."    Then Granny had to leave her too.
Is she missing one or both of them, and whose slippers are

these her feet kept getting lost in?    In the furry dream    Gray
fades from the levee, then the sky.

                                ~

Before my mother's looking glass, I hold this photo of her as a child
with the silent gray cat in her lap.         Imagine her years from then

pregnant during the mayhem—and there I hang        being prepared,
not quite ready to crown—birth muddled by predictions. The world
again at war.

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Copyright © 2023 Katherine Soniat All rights reserved
from Polishing the Glass Storm
LSU Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission