elm thicket with your whistle, a secreted

mystery, above the ice crush of runoff

as swollen as the president’s big beautiful bill

cutting health care for amputees,

diabetics, stroke victims quarantined to wheel chairs

those kingly devotees cannot afford,

a bill giving him control

of all of us, he believes.

His freedom to do anything he decrees

can accomplish any crime.

Waxwing, your budget is berries,

mountain ash, orange pyrocantha fermented too early

by Climate Change

but that’s just fake news.

I admire

your sleek lemonaid belly caught by mountain wind

as fresh as linen sheets flapping their egret wings.

Bird flirt,

I swear your slick crest nods at all the girls, your

quick wink,

come hither black eyes,

charm with no fat wallet

or title demanding a birthday cake parade of tanks

cracking asphalt on capital streets.

Dear waxwing, each fawn dun feather

is its own parade in the blue spruce

turning duty’s acid as sweet as a lover’s bitten bottom lip, bliss

busting open the hardest blistered heart.

Waxwing, sing me through a forest of half-

truths and excuses on TV news

to goats mewling next door, absentee owner gone

when it cold rains.   I feed them wet meadow

grass, stroke their lonesome noses, read the history

of human neglect in the name of freedom

forgiven in their spirit eyes.

Neither goats nor you, waxwing, listen to verbal brawls break

the Whitest House, fists full of murder

against enemies who refuse to kiss a gold-plated crown trumpeting

deportations and erecting penal camps

for asylum seekers in America’s biggest swamp.

.

Beautiful cedar waxwing, teach us the necessity of your days

tumbling from remote roosts to whistle, to feed

the hungry and besieged, to pick through

the chaff of lies to find one seed of truth, to break

the curse of angry wings.