Birding in Babylon

Birding in Babylon








My salvation is beauty’s kiss --

It approaches me like a windy spiral

of foppish leaves' dancing denial.

It leaves me with wonkish truths

Which bolster me with deepened roots.



For Mesopotamia, now midnight soot,

Has acquiesced beneath the boot;

From humankind this snake has grown

Hoping to consume its own

body, from start to end and head to tail

Where human life first burst forth, now it flails.



As it was in the beginning,

Is now and ever shall be;



A world of endless suffering;

Saved from pagan idolatry;

Carved from empire’s ideology;

Inflated by ambition’s puffery.





I seek what is invisible

Like birding in Babylon, an indivisible

faith in delicate things:

Feathers and song, and iridescent wings;

perched on fetid branches rest these drops of color

sporting costumes that dress war’s dolor.



It scours me pure like sandstorm grit.



It seeps like ink into my vision,

I am shorn and weakened like noble Sampson;

by a willow warbler’s lyric face

Or the fecund insistence of a fruit fly’s grace,



These are things that make Peace known,

If Wisdom is my head, then beauty is my bone.





Michael Biegner 2004