Footsteps crunch down winter’s dead, gray grass
Mourning dove wings whistle flight, alarm
These grey-necked birds with blushing breasts
balance on a rickety fence, turn one black eye.
Invaders advance, take what has died, kill what still lives.
The doves take flight.
There is something in that crunch they know,
a sound that slams all doors and hearts.
It hammers hard.
They’ve spent the day in flight, these doves
from tree to tree, house to house.
They’ve sat in nests, they’ve hunted specks of bugs and seeds.
Wobble in a maze of city streets and long, tall grasses.
They watch and wait.
A freeze descends,
a freeze that grins and rips the chest wide open.
This is a chill that loves a feast,
a chill that nibbles first then hacks its arms,
then chokes and vomits on its tail.
This chew, this gnaw,
these sounds hiss, hurry away.
The boot-stepped weight that crushes leaves and blades,
the howl of dog, the wheels that groan along cement,
the distant pops of guns,
the clink and hiss, the metal canisters of gas.
Since start of light, a dove must stay alive.
From dinosaur claw, to small ball of fluff,
egg to egg,
sun to sun
dusk to dusk.
Alarm’s vocabulary assembled
in push of suns, in waxing, waning moons.
Today its time.
We lurch our eyes to monster’s ram on door, tackled body to a ground.
A gentle dove must pull the air and sing with wings
an honest song: I am afraid, I don’t want to die, I have to flee.
A calculus of centuries fires circuits in a brain.
A dove does, what doves do.
Its fluttering flights sing a little while it flees.
A Prince once sang
This is what it sounds like when the doves cry
He could have sang about the color of his skin,
about the badge and guns on fat men’s hips.
But no, he sang about the sound,
the stirring wings, the cooing songs,
a world that’s so cold,
the sound of fear,
the wretched flight.
To that Prince I raise a glass
I hear the clinking swirl of ice
I swallow the bitter liquid
I place the frosted cup down
I move with the crowd towards the light.
—Emily Romano, AuD
