by Faith Barrett

The wind in the wires makes the moon rise,

Pinned to treasure in a flat black sky.

The little gems are satellites, are space trash

Or planets I can’t name. Where the wind comes from,

Making weather. The measure of light

Is muted now, is tempered.

A friend, reluctant to visit, points to

The 5-day forecast. I think to myself:

That’s the 4-month forecast: cloudy,

With a 60% chance of something falling

From above. But sometimes

Just at dusk the light cuts through

Along the horizon and the clouds

Are pushed up by the sudden luster

And unexpected sheets of color,

Gold, of course, but also a crushed lavender,

And the flat black silhouettes of three-story houses

Cut out against that shock of pink

Make you remember every shade of green,

Of gray or umber that you saw in the woods

In November, the way that weeks of gray

Might make you rank the gray days, yes,

As being of greater or lesser darkness,

But might also make you see every individual

Shade of green, gray or brown, every last September

Blossom still caught on its dry stem.

Or the way the peregrine falcon swept down, at dusk,

From the telephone pole to strike and kill—in one sheer stoop—

The rock pigeon. Having taken what it needed,

It dropped the scored and upturned body on the walk,

Some of the feathers still floating down.

Faith Barrett is an associate professor of English at Duquesne University. She has published a scholarly book focused on American Civil War poetry and has coedited a Civil War poetry anthology. Her current poetry manuscript in progress uses the discourse of ornithology as a means of responding to global climate change.