Murmuration

We grieve in birds, in wings we don’t have, struggling in the wind with
useless arms, until we land, and then we hold each
other, hovering between depression and acceptance, in a circle
of other strangers, and we speak to its center:
the emptiness of the emptiness,
as though it could answer. We came to be
wiped of words, hollowed of lungs
teeth and belly and brain – how little we are
when everything else falls away, how easily we lift
and gather and scatter, in the green crease of
evening, same time every day,
we are smoke. We are holy
in the place where our wounds touch
we go on.

*

~ a collaborative poem by Sharmila Voorakkara & Ron Riekki ~

Sharmila Voorakkara received her MFA from the University of Virginia. Her first collection of poems, Fire Wheel, was published in 2004 by the University of Akron Press.

Ron Riekki’s books include My Ancestors are Reindeer Herders and I Am Melting in Extinction (Loyola University Maryland’s Apprentice House Press), Posttraumatic (Hoot ‘n’ Waddle), and U.P. (Ghost Road Press).