Self-Portrait with Crow

As I punch the time-clock, I know men will be gunned down at dawn in a distant continent, someone will dart into a café with a bomb nestled in the belly, by the roadside a woman will moan over the body of a man, shrunken, stretched on the earth, that God will finger the forehead of a dying country, all of it funneled through the news on TV. But tonight, instead of tuning in, I’m going to kneel beside the window, recognize myself in the croak of the crow, high above the black tree of winter, claws hooked and rough, wings swept back and hunched, face masked with exhaust. I’m going to try, even if I fail, to see myself whole, complete in the cry, in the beak of the crow.