Last October I found a thrush dead on the asphalt outside
my downtown studio. I scooped up the
olive-brown bird — limp
but still so exquisite.
Then placing it on my drawing table, I studied those intricate feathers
around beak and eye, while sketching
its stiffened scaly feet. And I couldn't help but think about the
difference between natural death and the senseless
death of road-kill.
It then occurred to
me that I might one day create a video with Dan’s poem, “If I Were GOD,” as a
requiem to all those creatures
who die from our blundering ways.
— Suzanne
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If I Were GOD
. . .
Thrushes
would not plunge
through ice-storms, snapping
off those hulking towers
I’d allowed to rise
&
thrive, nor suck into
great engines streaking
shrilly overhead —
nor would I let them
slap
against the blind
herd of smeared windshields
zapping glibly
through
VAST DAYLIGHT on
My
thoroughfares
below. Nor
would they perish in lost flocks
flung to chill waves
by shocking shifts
of
climate that, when dreamy,
I’d allowed.
I’d beg Myself: “No
more. No more mistakes.”
But in My SECOND
COVENANT, I’d now so much
more
carefully
devise, of balmy
days of Grace for
feathered
sprites
so intricately fashioned on
the third day of My ART,
I’d touch their slumping
spirits
with hushed sighs of mild
breeze, those fragile bodies
stammering with aches so fine
they’d soothe / as, chirring,
they’d
float down through sunlit
updrafts, buoying a most gradual
descent . . .
till sweeping through
the tree-limbs, past those
bare nests where their
brief lives
had begun, they’d settle
oh so lightly
into brush.
oh so lightly
into brush.
 |
| sketchbook page, thrush |
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"If I Were GOD" was first published in Ascent, Concordia College, Moorhead, Minnesota.
