Emissaries

An ungainly bird is the sandhill crane,
its spindly legs stretched like ropes
of silly putty, its pointy beak
of pointless length. Cinnamon chicks, 
plain as their mother, scamper after
her ambitious wings, the dun blandness
of her feathers, the rouge-red smear
above her eyes, the white blotch below. 
Soon they will grow as long as she,
have to bend almost in half to rough up 
the undergrowth, to peck fallen corn
and beetles from fields, to ferret out frogs 
in the shallows. Each chick sticks
with its mom, quaint and ugly.

But they are mythic creatures, perhaps 
their bones remember. Eons ago,
two supernovae collided and blasted
them to Earth as particles,
no darkness the year of their arrival. 
Certainly they have flown far
across the earth, a swoop to Siberia, 
a swoop to the Shetlands.

Inside themselves, they must feel
a vibrancy more primordial
than beauty. You hear it in their staccato
harmonics, sound winding through
the long horns of their tracheas.
You see it in their dances,
bowing to honor each other,
then leaping, elated,
and on the way down, twirling.

Susan Elizabeth Howe is the author of the poetry collections Salt (2013) and Stone Spirits (1997), which won the Charles Redd Center Publication Prize and the Association for Mormon Letters Award in Poetry.