Verdad Magazine Volume 11
Fall 2011, Volume 11
Poetry by Al Maginnes
Ornithomancy
Now there’s a word to settle down with
—Charles Wright
The word, springing from a long-forgotten novel,
sang with a notion that the world might display
its intentions, the furies and pleasures of its gods
so clearly that an attitude of wings, an angle
of ascent could tell us this one lives, that one
must die. In this realm, where sharp shadows
of birds and planes skim fresh-cut grass
like whispers out of an imagined heaven, any sign
that promises a world beyond this world is enough
to let us lie awake and wonder. And because
birds are the beings closest to Sunday school illustrations
of angels, men have grabbed hard to the notion
that birds have a toehold on the divine.
In Homer, a heron’s cry spelled luck to Odysseus.
An eagle’s appearance moved the Argive army to cheers,
But I’ve watched birds scrabble in dirt too long
to grant them too large a say over earthly matters,
and I was enchanted by the word’s music,
not any belief that my future was foretold.
Tonight wants the word woven into a poem
as deftly as birds works straw or shreds of plastic and cloth
into nests. But birds know what their nests must hold.
I have only a handful of syllables and a faith hatched
from birds and poems, sounds worth spending
a lifetime learning to divine.
A Chinese Poet Contemplates His Journey
The moon tonight means less than the sliver
of fingernail I trimmed while I waited
for my wine. To the left of me, wars
and the stories of wars. From the right,
mythologies and dust. I wish there was
someone to play music. I would pay them
for a song that would help erase all
that is looming and distant. I wish
I did understand one word I hear
spoken around me. This purple wine,
this bench where I sit, the sun whose warmth
lingers, like me, long into evening,
these are all things I hold dear tonight.
Behind me, a grave. Before me,
another. Soon leaves will whirl
and die, yellow tongues crisping brown.
The stark penmanship of trees will be written
against a sky swept bare
as the stones I climbed to the school
where I learned poems and numbers,
where I learned some roads led
to the borders of this kingdom,
and some traveled beyond.
BIO: Al Maginnes is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently Ghost Alphabet which won the 2007 White Pine Poetry Prize, and was published in October of 2008, Dry Glass Blues (Pudding House Publications, 2007), a single long poem published as a chapbook and Film History (Word Tech Editions, 2005). A former recipient of an Individual Artists Grant from the North Carolina Arts Council, his poems have appeared in many national and regional journals and anthologies as well as the websites Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and How A Poem Happens. He lives with his family in Raleigh, NC and teaches at Wake Technical Community College.