Crossing 6^th Avenue in Winter Sunlight

I was feeling something akin to loss 
like tourists practicing compassion in Yangon, 

who purchase caged sparrows and release them
while agile teenage boys with nets 

clamber out along the nearby branches 
to recapture the same birds to sell again tomorrow. 

With oncoming traffic halted by stoplights, 
I paused mid-avenue to consider the sky: 

cloudless, without a single gull or pigeon, 
no helicopter or passenger jet to blemish the fathomless azure, 

as absence melded into glass-translucence, 
and in its image, wonder. 

---

Peter Marcus | Contents
Mudlark No. 55 (2014)