“To the Dead White-Throated Sparrow” appears in my new chapbook forthcoming in March from Main Street Rag: The Death’s-Head’s Testament<<Available here for pre-order purchase for the fantastic price of $6.50/copy! 

To the Dead White-Throated Sparrow

_____in my driveway:
Would you at least do me the courtesy
of an explanation?

What’s with your belly-mound-
cenotaph-arisen-from-the-stony-gloom
spiel?  And why

this exquisite bundle of yours,
with its still-tender russets
folded in the unbounded repose

of a napping cherub,
as if you didn’t believe
you were still reaching for the clouds?

_____I mean,
was your plump little belly’s
sky tribute supposed to un-stone the gloom

underfoot (as if
your heavenward-splayed
finger-knobs, all ruddy-bottomed

like a napping cherub,
never knew their very purpose
was reaching for the clouds)?

The spectacle of your tiny black
lids pressed shut in sudden,
brutal resignation to croaking

_____underfoot (even
consecrated by such skyward-clasping,
ruddy-bottomed branchlessness)

hardly passes for
transubstantiation…  Why package
a fully-intact cadaver’s senselessness in

the spectacle of black-faced
brutality’s sudden,
penitent resignation to permanent blindness

for stealing a glimpse
of the sun?  Besides, adaptive
hydrophobia á la iridescent feather-sheath

_____hardly passes for
transubstantiation…  Why package
a fully-intact cadaver’s senselessness in

this exquisite bundle of yours,
with its still-tender russets
folded in the unbounded repose

of a dead sun-god, as if iridescence
were designed expressly for
stealing a glimpse of the afterlife

in my driveway?
All right, buddy, just do me this one favor:
Spare me, would you?

STEPHANIE L. HARPER

“To the Dead White-Throated Sparrow” was first published in slightly different form in  Underfoot Poetry. Thank you to editors Daniel Paul Marshall and Time Miller — both fabulous poets in their own right! — for selecting this piece.