MADHURI KATHLEEN AKIN
(1952-- )
Retired therapist; Jewelry Designer; Psychic; Poet; Travel Writer; Meditator
(b.) Riverside, California; (l.) Nixa, Missouri

(My childhood home was three blocks from the tracks, where a nut-canning factory spread crushed shells over the ground. I used to dream the trains got off the tracks and went through the streets.)


THE CROWS (1969)


We are the crows.
We stroll between railroad tracks
trading brown coins.
We rise to the wires
when a train blows by;
it storms and sucks at our feet
that are like stolen twigs
rasping their scales together,crowding.

In the morning
warehouses pile
just inside our vision.
The grey lights switch all day
and we shake from our feathers
broken dust and walnut shells.
We peck between steel thighs.



Once one of us
jabbed his beak in tar.
Gravel stuck to it;
he slowly starved.
His fish-roe eye
was desperate; he clung
to a glittering telephone pole.
When he fell through the dusk,
we were the crows
watching the train-light slice him
like a dust-filled egg.

Shifting on the wires at night,
our heads are filled
with our dreams
that thunder through the streets,
swollen huge and runaway
soot slapping the trees.

Madhuri Kathleen Akin