All the people I have known
have moved from place to place,
spreading their wings across
the horizon to something new.
A single crane, its wings
as wide as the land,
if the world opened up
like each of us opens our lungs
to breathe. If a crane could
strike through the smoke
and thick heat of these days
without its wings catching fire,
maybe we would see everything
as God or as verbs of God.
It seems the people who once
felt wind lift them across sky,
have lost their memory of flight,
their own wings now foreign.
Liza Wolff-Francis is a poet and writer with an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Goddard College. Her writing has appeared in we’moon, eMerge, and Poetry Pacific, among others. She has a chapbook out called Language of Crossing (2015, Swimming with Elephant Publications) about the Mexico-U.S. border.
