Emancipation Day Poem by Paul Baumann

I tried the bus that day, and found it pleasant enough

with the burning ceaselessness of restless air

caught in the throat of these eyes and their miles

every repeated word is the genuflection we'd planted

in quarter-hour segments, seeking the 'sermon's birds'

was how you pronounced the process we'd tried,

bandaging wounds entered into the feathers added later

to a similar bird caught flying in another church

the ladies of which heard us reaching with the netting

out into the air where the priest had released his,

each petting their own currency, each wingtip vetting

its own ladder's rungs, all chugging is like the chugging we promised out,

this chugged glass of a sermon that was clothespinned

overnight outside, beside the priest's lipstick-stained

white rose petals, each one inscribed with a stick figure

and a dance move, a roundabout barely mentioned

in the swift sermon's currencies, its gestated twin crows

charcoal and smoky, bleakly iridescing in indigo crusts,

flown more than once this morning- seen by all eyes

in the sad church- freed men still must write their birds like this-

freed men still must write out the feathery morning's chimed flight.