Bird's Instinct
By Rachel Chitofu
I savored the sun's scorching deferral,
drifting on a worn tongue,
wings unfurled in brazen gold.
I seized the rock,
clenched it in my swollen grip,
then flung it at the fowl
that crossed my path.
Feathers flared open
in a single lash of wind,
witnessing speed, not me.
The whorled voice of time
howled in frenzied shrieks,
shattering rocks,
as leaves below strained
for their ancestral calls,
the battling hymns
whose rush ignited
in the blaze of beauty.
It wasn’t I who cast the stone,
nor the bird's instinct that shrieked
as it landed, limp,
on the coppered sands.
But the sand, no ally of time,
rejects the waiting decay
in that desperate hand
yearning to cradle
the blood of a fallen bird.
Rachel Chitofu is a medical student and part-time chicken herder from Harare, Zimbabwe.
