Not-Angels: a poem

when death is the punishment for a lack of faith.

I don’t entertain religious symbolism.

A crowd of buzzards bound above my childhood home,
clay sinks into each weathered footpath,
grandpa with his cap hung low
over closed eyes
just west of the house
dozing heavy, toes grazing the pond.

I dreamt of the word “haruspicy” the night
before November. The church doesn’t put faith in that.

But I don’t stop praying
when Sunday passes again
the second “amen” closes the service
and I still don’t feel God 
love me, if He’ll ever send an angel, but still
I open the Bible to the book of Job.

At church nobody says “haruspicy,”
and nobody witnessed the plague take aim
for the red barn
and find the men at work inside
take them each at separate times
after my mother.

The story always tears teeth apart.
They all start praying the second I finish it.

They pray for their siblings, younger, older,
their parents, their harsh and sinking eyes, their dreams
shoved in the book somewhere, their blinds
drawn dark all because a plague
knows family trees and faces.

I watch the buzzard, oak feathered,
scour along the dirt by the porch.
She looks at me and I am scared
we will all die soon. I read on.

I say “amen,” and hope He has listened.
They can’t terrify me enough,
by the porch
another buzzard peers at me,
dove down from the empty sky.

How am I
supposed to pray for a future
then bury another member?

On the third year, we may have believed in peace
and lived out a fractal of life apart,
at college, the three of us. But my brother
saw my mother before the wreck. Do you believe that?

It makes no difference, really.

This poem is supposed to make you
believe in plagues and feathered non-angel things
with no near God in sight.

I walk our constellation of headstones
as the pastor twirls a feather between his fingers.

“Such quiet strength…” almost in a whisper,
“it’s the same color as your eyes,” and he holds
the feather beside my temple to prove it.

“A buzzard,” I claim, blank but sure of it.

He searches the sky for it.

A hymn plays at the church
across the street from us.

“I’m sure it’s flown off,
off to look for better food
somewhere with a little more life.”

My hands tighten in my pockets
as the feather twirls back to the ground.

“Before I was a pastor,” he leads,
“when I struggled with faith and walked blindly,
I felt nothing made any sense,
so I adhered everything to compensate for that feeling.”

The voices of the hymn fade and die slowly,
I wonder if the birds
have looked at him like that in his youth.

I appreciate Pastor Jim,
I hope he knows
I believe exactly what he tells me,
in exchanges of buzzard and angel feathers.

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This is my poetry midterm assignment for college. Class was given a bunch of poems to select from, I selected “And Send a Bird” by Chessy Normile. With that poem, I had to close read it, then create contextualized, line-by-line prompts in order to recreate a version of that poem. It’s not the best, but I am at least happy with the direction I took with it and it’s themes of omens, divination, fate, and mortality.