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 twentieth installment is presented this week by Meghan Broughton.
XX.
All this she has seen: in shorn times and moments lost.
She glides over, releasing memories into the labyrinth,
where falsehoods built from truths propel her, fluttering, forward.
All that remains are ineffable impressions of times past,
which once were the newest, the most pressing, the summations of self now gone to seed.
To die each day
and spring anew
within the embers of the mind’s eye.
In a mind since gone, found among the ancestors in a brush with absolute time.
In a confident though childish mind that believes itself the avant-garde.
In minds hewn in their own obsolescence.
In undying minds plagued by viruses and buffering updates.
Our hero in her solitude is cleansed in sacrifice and hurling sand storms that minuscule-stone her, forcefully molting her yesterdays in golden hours of perfumed twilight.
She pads blindly onward beneath diaphanous scarlet as the chill creeps foot to forehead
and all sense of being drains dry,
flattened first by the sun and now the mist and soon the moon’s veiled visage which guards the hills she must traverse
as if she knows herself, knowing she does not.
