A Holiday

White feathers snowing the highway, thank God
it's not a blizzard, it's mid-November

and the weather's holding: let there be dry
asphalt in the mornings until Christmas.

They're turkeys, of course, squatting cheek to cheek
in wire cages bound (how do they hold on?)

to a truck-bed, hundreds flying toward
butchers, Walmart bins, our celebrations.

Bede wrote that life is a sparrow speeding
from darkness to darkness through the dimly-

lit and narrow-raftered mead-hall. Where else
is there to go? The down blankets every

lane, the driver is swerving left and right
in the fever of his desire to get

wherever he's going. The birds hunker
down, already poultry, and above us

swirling flocks of dark starlings graffiti
the sky. They don't know what to say, either—

their wings unspeaking the white flurry, a
double negative. Jesus, we all think,

just get us home, away from diesel stench,
death on the news, and when we close our doors

in blessed silence, relief, forgive us,
though we will know exactly what we do.

Copyright © 2007 Sarah Kennedy All rights reserved
from A Witch's Dictionary
Elixir Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission