scarecrow poetics/essays

For Larry Tell

As we filled your grave with dirt,
and watered the ground with our tears,
the blackbirds gathered.

A semicircle of blackbirds,
a horseshoe of blackbirds,

glided across the sky with ease,
as if to form the song,
of one
immortal nightingale.

Just when we thought
the birds were out of sight,

and we were left with the rain
drizzling down
to surround our sorrow,

the blackbirds turned round
to fly once more above your grave.

We could only look up silently,
at the blackbirds in the gray sky
singing of the freedom
the dead must know.

Lisa Williams © 2006.

Lisa Williams is a Professor of Literature at Ramapo College of New Jersey, and lives in New York City. She is the author of Letters to Virginia Woolf and also The Artist as Outsider in the Novels of Toni Morrison and Virginia Woolf.

See this interview at RSB and this Scarecrow review.