Overcast at sunrise, with a cool breeze. A gray catbird in the middle of the gray driveway picks pebbles for the collection in its gizzard.
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Overcast at sunrise, with a cool breeze. A gray catbird in the middle of the gray driveway picks pebbles for the collection in its gizzard.
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(Not technically pebbles, but granules. I love the geologists’ definition: “A pebble is a clast of rock with a particle size of 4 to 64 millimetres based on the Krumbein phi scale of sedimentology.”)
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SOMALIA IN MY MIND
At sunrise, they rouse their children,
if they have not yet mercifully died,
to trek through desert mirage searching
for oases, cacti, lizards, iguanas, worms,
anything. It’s a landscape of clean bones,
or carrion abandoned by even the crows
that fell prey to the ghastly death march.
I take a guilty gulp at my now tepid tea
when I espy a catbird swallow pebbles
strewn on the sunbaked driveway:
I wonder if a starved child’s bloated belly
in Somalia can hold as many rock chips
to ease the pangs of hunger? Catbirds
prefer strewn granules to desert sand,
I reckon, but neglect a usual morning shrug.
—Albert B. Casuga
07-23-11
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“Somalia on my Mind” is also reposted in:
http://albertbcasuga.blogspot.com/2011/07/somalia-in-my-mind.html
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