by Laura Parker Roerden
I. Every night now the swallows
fall and rise together over the hayfield,
slicing the sky as if skinning it open
to feed on insects.
I can imagine DaVinci must have seen them.
His drawings of flying machines spoke of
curved elegance; of momentum that turns
planes of existence upside,
down.
Of alacrity and dreams
made visible
by wind—
aloft a spark of heart applied
to mathematics and unified through computation,
which brought us to soar impossibly
off a beach in North Carolina—to step on the moon,
though he held only a simple pencil to paper
fueled by a thirst for knowing.
II. Our ancestors’ myths rose like birds and
connected us to truth as sinew,
told us of our place in clan,
in dirt and cosmos.
But modern myths divide us.
They take off as false words and ideas
—unreal facts crumbled in
angry knuckles of hate.
They do nothing to open hope’s heart.
They do not flip the trigger in your throat
that speaks only of the rising and falling
and dawn that is a truth
known as world without end.
III. DaVinci was said to buy birds in cages
at market
and set them free.
What would he think of the
prisons we now willingly enter;
of those we deny even exist?
Yes, these new myths keep us from knowing;
they separate us from the land and each other
like a knife expertly removes bone
from flesh. If we accept it in hand,
we will never soar in ballet together
like the swallow.
IV. I’ve watched these swallows in flight
long enough to see—
if you wing out your perspective far enough—
there is utter cooperation among them.
And that the road to freedom
is one where we release not ourselves,
but one another from these cages,
one by blessed one,
each now enfolded unto one another.
We can instead choose to be as origami
and turn the simple flat dimensions
—in which we all seem to dwell—
into birds in flight
for peace.