What Is a Grackle? BY SUSAN ELIZABETH HOWE A comfort common to Southwest desert parking lots, a familiar, a messenger, an overlooked angel oiled by asphalt,

consolation of the casino, supermarket spiritual guide picking at a free-today hot dog, a dropped grape or lentil,
its purple-green head iridescent, its long keel of a tail. Black birds but not blackbirds

with their showy epaulettes blood-red as a war field. Grackles glint like lacquered ebony, the females brunhildas,

if by brunhilda you mean “brown-headed,” not the German “ready for battle.” Blind to centuries of borders, of battles, they waddle

stiff-legged at your feet, a janitorial sweep to their tails, checking cart tires and light poles for moths, beetles, singing their seven songs —

slides, whistles, wheezes, catcalls, chirps, murmurs, clucks — to console you for your losses: stolen cars, mortgage
payments spun to mist at a roulette table, the beloved who breathed fire and scorched your wedding clothes. Folly, wreckage,

hey mutter, down among the packs of backerboard and spackle. We’ve fallen from Mayan temples. In a past life we prophesied. In a past life we were gods.
What Is a Grackle? by Susan Elizabeth Howe | Poetry Magazine

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Lovely post, lovely poem. I will respect the grackle more now.