Today's poem is by Amy Roa

Raven
       

I had a series of violent coughing fits. A sharp invasion of sounds like those which you hear from nitrogen and phosphorus curdling in open ponds.
I was taken to see a doctor.
This doctor held my face in her hands, then reached her forearm down my throat, there retrieved a raven, black feathered and black billed, the source of my coughing, and that which had pecked my airways to decay.
Here's the sad things about ravens: they know a great deal of the past, stories we're better off without, the muscle and cartilage that do not fossilize, the snare that had failed to loop around an angle of attack.
The coughing had stopped, and I was thinking this would be the last time I would see my raven. I bent my head closer to him so that he would recognize my short breaths. He held one of my lungs in his bill.
"You know this don't you?," I asked him. "That the weight of damaged objects can be judged by how they behave in the wind."

Copyright © 2024 Amy Roa All rights reserved
from ANMLY
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission