WHAT WE ARE BECOMING by Steven Scher

I. Iowa City Natural History Museum

The feathers

unnaturally smooth

will never fluff again.

The glass eyes don't search.

Polished bills aren't grasping bugs to beaks in a breeze.

But these birds hold a place in the world.

Harbingers of life long removed from us.

Just the recording of their song to soothe their empty eggshells.

Encased, they tell us

The world once 

Quaked under the beating of a billion wings.

But our cracking gunshots, 

They are muffled by the falling feathers.

Our slight scratchings only count and document.

Remembered only in paste and plasticine.

We are blind to the poverty in the world we have created.

We won't ever soar because

We aren't covered in hope or feathers.

We cannot strip off the seconds stuck to our sinking souls.

We can only wait for our transparent tombs. 

Lifted by a painted breeze

these glassed-up geese and peacocks 

Could give us pause enough to be grabbed by the enormity of what is gone,

These ghosts of ancient worlds 

Could fill our gasping lungs 

They could yet enfold us,

Wing us away.

From

The place we are 

Becoming

Steven Scher is a Seattle-based poet and author of the children's book, "The Moon Bear." His environmental poetry draws on the Pacific Northwest landscape, exploring the tensions between human development and the natural world.