Ghazal With Joshua Tree Avian Life, Pamphlet

After all these years, the poem still remembers you: a mourning dove alights on a telephone wire, calls other mourning doves.

My daughter wakes early, carries cereal to the porch of the AirBnB. She watches the sky go from black to gray to mourning doves.

The loggerhead shrike “impales its prey (lizards, insects) on thorns.” This seems both clever and dickish, I confess to the mourning dove.

True story: your “crop,” an esophageal storage sac, can hold 1,000 millet seeds. Don’t sneeze, mourning dove!

Hunters “harvest” 20 million of your siblings each year. Exemplar of grief, so much cause for mourning, dove.

Jo, your past lives are boring. Forget Joan of Arc, the lover’s shove— with any luck, you were a mourning dove.