Street Performer

 

There were birds

Oddly silent, still,

But puzzling eye then eye

At the scrawny mime

On the gum-dotted sidewalk

 

Bringing out something soft

and fragile in his hands.  His protective

Mother-shoulders all care drawn towards

Beating life in hands become cups. Cellular

Listening to pulsing puff and

Hoarse peep: the real birds

Looked harder as if to strain their eyes

Into the empty hands of the pantomime, he,

Great mother bird,

Proudly, generously flinging the loved life

Aloft and so continuing the motion into wide

Wings, he, puzzling eye then eye

At the grounded beings of air lifted

Himself into flight simultaneously with

The audience of birds all down bellies on the sky

And gone.