David Yezzi, "Birds of the Air"

She’s the trunk and they’re the blowing branches:
the seagulls mass around her as she scatters
bread crusts grapped from a plastic grocery bag.
They dip to her, since bread is all that matters.

She cases the crumbs in lamplight, over water,
to gulls who catch her manna on the wing —
snatching their staple needs straight from the air,
the sky replete with every wanted thing,

until it seems that they might live off giving.
Back in the bag, her right hand burrows in
and finds a further hunk of loaf and chucks it
into the glinting sleet. The cries begin,

and, without fail, bread finds another mouth.
After she goes, the dark birds settle back.
They float south with the floes along the bank,
their fortune pitched in wind, the water black.


David Yezzi

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