Near Flight

By Luchik ‘24

Part I

I imagine you searched the sky, Bifocals traded for binoculars, Nearing the pine tree, crackling needles texture The whispered murmur of a sun-scorched forest. Kyiv boils in summertime, And the little cemetery of cross-beamed stakes impales its loamy hill. While a red-ringed smokestack belches dim exhaust into a cyanide sky.

Concrete slabs course through the matted brush. Hungry weeds lap up the ruin. Soviet or Scythian, The forest forgets in equal measure. You enter the copse, break brittle carpet with lonesome intrusion, Like any serf stealing away from the plow within the last millennium. That peasant sees a flock of sparrows break upwards from a low-beamed fence, panting wings churning the molasses heat.

You–a Jew with eyes thrown higher than the stakes between two grainfields, yearn for a greater bird.

To dive, slice through the air, Outpacing the immolation

Of your childhood, Branded with two smoldering stars: yellow / red a six-legged insect drowned

In raspberry kompot

So you climbed the ashy limbs

Of the only telephone pole predatingTsar Nicholas, swaying in the free Dnieper breeze, to the hawk perched there near flight.

Part II

Did you imagine then, before you fell, crumbs caking every crevice, stained plastic cutlery scenting the seats, quarters and nickels glued down with spilled juiceAll this in your graying Honda?

That too-large too-thick coat like a big black beetle brimming with trifles. Or twenty-dollar breakfasts at IHOP: très leches on kids’menus.

On the freeway home: the full-bellied sloth, Sun pressing a palm against the cold windows of your Honda And a fidgety boy fingering theAC, draped in downy coat

Because he forgot his at home, And you aren’t cold anyway. From atop the pine,

From the dawn of your prime, Audubon aubade craning toward The hawk’s nest, near flight.