Birdwolf is a new year-long project authored by the collective Entropy community. It is a collaborative online epic poem written by the Entropy community on a weekly basis. A different author will write the next stanza or section of the poem each week, to be posted every Tuesday, following the previous post from the previous week, and following a very limited set of guidelines (that each author has one week to write the next piece after the previous week’s installment goes up, that the installment should build from the previous section’s content and form, and that contributions should range between 8 and 24 lines or be a visual work).
Follow the entire epic poem here: Birdwolf.
The twenty-eigth installment is presented this week by Adrienne Walser.
XXVIII.
What world broke through the feathers
Was ruthless and cruel, elliptical in rules
That followed no seasons save for those carved
By a tyrant’s whim. Mirror, Mirror in the palm-
The flesh of subtext, the law. What petals eclipse
The earth where we’re from?
. . . . . . Birdwolf, she – we –
might make a map right now. Her wings loose the threads
We swallow with our ears into a mouth: house-fen
Of glistening muck. What luck she’s found our way
To whale-road. & here we three: Wulf who was listening
As the sun crisps the glaciers of the east. & then four:
Eadwacer in the glyph-glade, that sylf-shadow.
. . . . . . Her letters
In our eye, this carpet of currents untangling all
the Junes, the many severed seasons of July calving
melting tablets into sour lakes. Our letters
in her eye, a cleaving at the window. How does
that one song go? The one we write three
centuries from now? It’s where she hangs our face
in the branches, looks back to see the old
Suns spinning, orbits unraveling the sounds
We’d never heard, but remembered.
