VINYL POETRY

Volume 9, November 2013

BIRDIE
Robert WhiteheadView Contributor’s Note

[ * ]

As an illness is lived with. As the night comes on
and won’t release until. And then another sudden return.
The ill dark fit to the lung of the sky, the sun a deep cough.
I have something to tell you.
Impossibly, I was sick again. I was virus and trouble.
There were shadows my ear would cast on your voice
when you finally said, enough. That word was a shadow
on a shadow. I should tell you.
Imagine what the night would be if it got sick. If it fevered.
The hour when it all does a downward move to desertion,
torched. And we’d be long in light, knowing it was wrong,
not caring. Who cares for the sick
when what makes them sick brings, to the ones touched
by this wrong, a sort of joy
a radiance not unlike suns foreign in the sky.