Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Literary Hub

    ‘Fatal Light Awareness,’ A Poem by Margaret Atwood

    by Margaret Atwood Jul 17, 2019 1 minute

    A thrush crashed into my window:
    one lovely voice the less
    killed by glass as mirror—

    a rich magician’s illusion of trees—
    and by my laziness:
    Why didn’t I hang the lattice?

    Up there in the night air
    among the high-rises, music dies
    as you fire up your fake sunrises:
    your light is the birds’ last darkness.

    All over everywhere
    their feathers are falling—
    warm, not like snow—
    though melting away.

    We are a dying symphony.
    No bird knows this,
    but us—we know

    what our night magic does.
    Our dark light magic.

    Arctic tern

    Gannet

    Rufous-crested coquette

    Violet tailed sylph

    Bald eagle

    _____________________________________________________

    “Fatal Light Awareness” by Margaret Atwood first appeared in Bringing Back the Birds: Exploring Migration and Preserving Birdscapes Throughout the Americas (2019), from American Bird Conservancy and nonprofit publisher Braided River. Published with permission. All photos by Owen Deutsch.

    More from Literary Hub

    Literary Hub5 min read
    Doreen St. Félix on June Jordan’s Vision of a Black Future
    An aerial blueprint of an alternative future disoriented readers of the gentlemen’s magazine Esquire in April 1965. Three rivers—Harlem, Hudson, and East—carve this divergent Harlem as they carve the known Harlem, producing its shape, that maligned a
    Literary Hub13 min readPsychology
    On Struggling With Drug Addiction And The System Of Incarceration
    There is a lie, thin as paper, folded between every layer of the criminal justice system, that says you deserve whatever happens to you in the system, because you belong there. Every human at the helm of every station needs to believe it—judge, attor
    Literary Hub9 min read
    On Bourbon, Books, and Writing Your Way Out of Small-Town America
    For years I drove back and forth between Mississippi and Kentucky to spend time with the bourbon guru Julian Van Winkle III, sometimes for a day or two, sometimes just for a dinner. We talked about our families and about my business and his business

    Related