When Birds Die

by Max Gilman '25 on February 16, 2023
Portfolio Co-Editor


Portfolio


In what ways could the sun eat the sky? 

In an auburn-radiant shade, cloaked in sifting haze? 

Harboring mahogany howls, slowly fading crimson-cloudlines? 

Beating blood orange beams of sun death consume your vision;  

to butcher your former attention; mindless death—ignoring individualism.  

Sun,  

   Eat me like you eat skylines 

Before my mind is mossed 

 in patterned anxieties of my owner’s deadlines. 

Sun, 

  Brilliant poet of silence and scattered bird flight, 

Eat me in a roaring red blaze. 

Dreading the end is comedy 

because my work collar chokes me blind  

to the burning sunrise we desire 

in mornings we wake to quaking hellfire, 

When spires fall and money rots, 

Where birds die,  

                        But not from gunshots.