Revisionist Poetry – Avian Essence, v.3. (a lyrical reimagining)

Dried pods cradle the late light,
milkweed moons pinned to brittle twigs,
paper lungs folded against the throat
of a sky that holds its breath.

Morning comes in a hush of wings —
or perhaps it comes as patience breaking,
a single seam unzipping: crack,
the soft percussion of seed and silk.

Then a small weather rises, a tremor
of white, a hush that learns to sing:
skeins of floss unspool like lyric,
each filament a whisper with a weight.

They do not become at once what they seem —
not feather, not wholly bird, but promise,
a rumour of migration stitched to air,
a chorus assembling from the mouth of husk.

Wind tutors them in the slow grammar of lift,
teaches the syntax of drift and dart;
light gilds the edges, and the sky, surprised,
accepts these shaped bits of absence as body.

What was mute unthreads into motion,
a ledger of small flights written on the blue;
the branches empty like old songs finished,
and the world, unlatched, rehearses itself.

Listen: the papery crack becomes a pulse,
the scatter becomes a phrase repeated,
and somewhere between seed and song
a new language takes its first notations.

Do not name it — let the eye translate:
husk to halo, lint to lattice of wings.
Let your hands be open as the air,
let the ordinary peel and ascend.

So the day remakes itself in soft increments,
and you, who watched the waiting, learn to see —
how small combustions make whole heavens,
how the mundane keeps a seam for wonder.