Symbolic Reality

Symbols have always held a special pull whether manufactured and imposed
or evident and naturally grown--spontaneously existing in cold hard reality.
They scream dream on, and mean it without malice.
Symbols warn of success and promise hopeful danger.
Being only things that bode faith in happiness
and predict common failure.
Symbols bring us closer together when physically apart.
Each could represent all that means anything;
even anything that means nothing at all.
A wooden figure of a relative thing that means more than religiosity.
A carv'ed cross of metallic merit that represents agnostic views.
How you represent I; The way I represents you:
Just one chance to create perfection in life.

What the Crow? Doesn't know.

A crow laughs at a cackling hag
whose vision faded long before
she learned to see. The hag’s
human nature shows
right through to
Brother Crow:

She’s humored by comic
justice with sordid finale.
High above a city ally
the crow takes flight,
laughing at the kids below,
grown for thirty years,
tricksters themselves, no where to go—
manifestations of one another’s fears.

In a forgotten , over-grown field
the crow touches ground;
memories of another life,
too big for a bird’s brain,
--longing in a too small heart--
and no memory of the change.

The crow laughs about what he knows:
for the mistake he chose
with the ones who show
at those he loathes.

Brother Crow laughs to ease the pain
of memories he cannot comprehend;
he laughs, trying to stay sane
since the choice became a
mistake, unknown and undefined
the difference realized after
the unremembered changed.

Calculated time—each minute
measured became countless
moments all spread together.
The familiar faces matured
then dreadfully aged….
He saw each lain down
in manicured fields
then into the ground each
disappeared.

Brother Crow flies alone—
Not akin to other birds,
no longer human
--and all alone.