Birding in Babylon

Birding in Babylon My salvation is beauty’s kiss -- It approaches me like a windy spiral of foppish leaves' dancing denial. It leaves me with wonkish truths Which bolster me with deepened roots. For Mesopotamia, now midnight soot, Has acquiesced beneath the boot; From humankind this snake has grown Hoping to consume its own body, from start to end and head to tail Where human life first burst forth, now it flails. As it was in the beginning, Is now and ever shall be; A world of endless suffering; Saved from pagan idolatry; Carved from empire’s ideology; Inflated by ambition’s puffery. I seek what is invisible Like birding in Babylon, an indivisible faith in delicate things: Feathers and song, and iridescent wings; perched on fetid branches rest these drops of color sporting costumes that dress war’s dolor. It scours me pure like sandstorm grit. It seeps like ink into my vision, I am shorn and weakened like noble Sampson; by a willow warbler’s lyric face Or the fecund insistence of a fruit fly’s grace, These are things that make Peace known, If Wisdom is my head, then beauty is my bone. Michael Biegner 2004