Two
poems from Roy Seeger's The Boy Whose Hands Were Birds
followed
by a note on the author
Old
Men Reborn as Birds
Their
broken teeth & ribs shall,
too, fall to the dust
of abandoned buildings
& take root – each leaf unfurled
another
glossy feather,
every forked branch another
wrinkle on a newborn head
(the
carrion of each memory
an
ivory-tipped beak),
& in those first attempts at flight,
leaves gather
& lift,
stems break from the strain.
Those
who wholly emerge,
before leaving, honor
their brethren by feasting
on
them (by taking them along).
A
Tapestry of Birds
Pull
one stitch & another grows
taut (& another grows slack).
For the
sake of new beginnings
reinvent the natural world
to more perfectly
match our under-
standing – gold-ish crown, gray
woolen rib of wing
threaded with white, fragile wing-
ness
of wing, haunted stitch
of eye. For texture's sake alternate
every stitch
until each feather
becomes a row of parallel miracles
born from these
needles of bone:
yarn after yarn knotted
to its mate on the reverse side
(where each flaw shows & is forgiven).
©
Born
1973 in Brunswick Ohio to German immigrants, Roy Seeger earned his MA in poetry
from Ohio University in 2000 and his MFA in poetry from Western Michigan University
in 2005 where he has since taught English part-time, and lived with his wife,
the poet Amanda Rachelle Warren and their small gray dog, Bruce. Recently, he
has accepted a Full English Professor position at the the University of South
Carolina Aiken. His manuscript, The Boy Whose Hands were Birds, has been
selected the winner of the Main Street Rag Poetry Book Contest and is soon forthcoming.
His chapbook, The Garden of Improbable Birds is abailable from Gribble
Press and his poems have recently appeared in Painted Bride Quarterly,
Hayden's Ferry Review, Verse, the Laurel Review, Southeast
Review, as well as other journals.
"Old
Men Reborn as Birds" and "A Tapestry of Birds" first appeared in
Seeger's chapbook, The Garden of Improbable Birds.
