The Singing Birds by Marianne Worthington

The Singing Birds

In the graveyard the singing birds were all
you thought you needed. Grief makes you

want to rend your clothes like some histrionic
character from the Old Testament.

There is a violence to sadness: the force
of sorrow unwashed from the body, penetrating

your very scalp. Yet decorum dictates that you hold
it together while you stand over the dead when we

should be smashing our doubts and slapping each
other’s faces. Wake up. This is the hammering

injury that never heals. This is the time of day
when people should have tea, not bury their dead.

This is the moment when the singing birds follow
the wind and leave us stranded on a hill too big

to scale down without ropes and life support.
This is when you must face it: your loved one

in a box in the ground instead of dancing
with you on a Saturday night at the VFW.

Tonight, even the moon will be too cold to come out.

*

Marianne Worthington is author of The Girl Singer (University Press of Kentucky, 2021), winner of the 2022 Weatherford Award for Poetry. Her work has appeared in Oxford American, CALYX, Zone 3, and Swing, among other places. She cofounded and is poetry editor of Still: The Journal, an online literary magazine publishing writers, artists, and musicians with ties to Appalachia since 2009. She grew up in Knoxville, Tennessee, and lives, writes, and teaches in southeastern Kentucky.