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Augury

 

Let us be birds 

I’ll turn my sadness into nightingale song

And people will listen to me whinge till dawn and call it beautiful 

You can be an owl 

And hunt me

 

Or if that sounds too much like a dream 

Born from Eurocentric literature

From too many nights breathing Juliet’s lines at my mirror

Imagining “what if young Leonardo but a lesbian”

Then OK I’ll do slam poetry as a rosella

And you can do genderfuck drag as a lorikeet

Hell let’s be sparrows or gulls or geese

Let’s just get away from the ground 

And all its greed

For bodies bodies bodies 

 

Let us be birds

And have a meet cute on a wire

Our wingtips could subtly touch 

While we chirp about why the humans

Are all suddenly staying inside  

Let us be birds that shine fluorescent

In each other’s secret light.

 

Don’t you see that dreaming is where the power of flight begins? 

Didn’t you hear that the dinosaurs wished on a shooting star for wings?

Hold out your hand at curfew time 

Four radii away I’ll hold out mine 

Stare at our hands together 

Until the quills start to break through the skin

Aching for the sky.

Written by Nikki Viveca

Read by George Cowell and Jess Lu

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