Syrinx Spring
A fragment broken off a canary mystery play
At the end of Rome the emperor
and his followers tweeted at one another
until they violated the Tweeter rules.
They burned the forests for the wolves
so all that were left were the cathedral roofs
and then they burned those too.
The ceiling of rotating heaven
cranked by the dehumanized persons was buried
& fourteen centuries later praised by painters who fell
through a cleft in the soil,
who dreamt the frescoed raptors thereupon fantasy
whereas in truth they were just extinct.
* * *
Of this entire disenfranchisement,
the incandescent streets:
corseted throats heave
back names from the slurry.
Glowing yellow in a cage
full of oxygen: chants unheeded
unheeded
crimes with impunity.
* * *
What have we to say now that the reoxygenated Anti-
gen can no longer tweet?
Pentagon rebate.
Knock knock.
Who’s there to dub the silent spring?
A New Yorker columnist. A self-exploiting Insta-
brand. A bellows of poets in Milwaukee. Haunted
Dumpty.
Batter the wind against the fenced-in
national language organs to come
more variously up for air.
What breath’s left to shriek into the empty shaft?
This broken chorus of terror and nest, rape and repair.
Copyright © 2023 by Jennifer Scappettone. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 21, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.
“I wrote this between August 2020 and January 2021, when poetic language felt remote from the immediacy of respiratory crisis on familial, national, and planetary levels. The lyrics of the birds carved out coping space as the human world recoiled into screens and the citizens of the United States seemed confined to their own private syllables. The pandemic forced the signature breath control of the human species out of our grasp. So did the police. I looked to the coal mine canary for labored inspiration—a sentinel species whose voice box, the syrinx, enables them to generate gorgeous, bi-voiced songs while making them consummate omens of asphyxiation.”
—Jennifer Scappettone
Jennifer Scappettone
