White Crow
Not ebony, but ivory, the beak
yellowed as with age. And the feet
could disappear in fresh-fallen
snow without a trace. In summer,
this crow’s feathers glow like
the moon in an early morning sky—
soft, pale, luminescent against
the dense greenery of the open field.
Black ones scatter across the fresh
cut grass, each bird a silhouette
of crow, cawing out to its brethren,
strutting the stubble of the field,
self-important as deacons. Moths
worship the steady pulse of the back
porch light. Swans grace our wood-
parks in pairs, sleek as sailboats
seen from a distance. When this flock
of crows rise up, wings stroking
the air like ours, they cast beneath
them as they pass: a flock of shadows
and all of them—including the
white one—are uniformly black.
Deborah H. Doolittle has lived in lots of different places but for now calls North Carolina home. She has an MA in Women’s Studies and an MFA in Creative Writing and teaches as Costal Carolina Community College. She is the author of No Crazy Notions, That Echo (Longleaf Press, 2003), and Floribunda (Main Street Rag, 2017). Some of her poems have recently appeared (or will soon appear) in Albatross, Chiron Review, Eclectica Magazine, Hubbub, Illuminations: an International Journal of Contemporary Writing, Poets Espresso Review, and Slipstream. She shares a home with her husband, three house cats, and a backyard full of birds.