A poem with no birds
I woke up and I didn’t
hear the magpies at my window,
no cog rattles during
the Holy week when no bells
will sing. I am called to mass by silence, forced
to say another prayer for the yearly death
of god. I will throw breadcrumbs on the road
like petals for his resurrection, I will call birds
but only ants will follow, holding each crumb
like an offer to a barely breathing
bundle of meat, or a boulder to throw
against an enemy who escapes,
his feet pattering away in the rain.
A cardinal fights me beyond the mirror,
tries to kiss my eyes with her beak
and no, I am not crying. Raise a glass
of coffee, like a cup of crows, but
no one can protect me from
the lynx purring at the mouth
of my stomach, playing with tiny bones;
listen, a tiny rattle, made from the remains
of birds she ate, to birth nothing.
Luca Fois
Luca Fois is a poet living in Edinburgh, in the liminal space between languages. He loves poetry, writing, and vibing with chaos. You can find him in a local café thinking about the right word to end a line, lurking on X @cuttinghail and on Bluesky @cuttinghail.bsky.social; he’s also a chaotic ghost on Instagram @happy_narvalo, sharing words and food. His work has appeared on Streetcake Magazine, Tiny Wren Lit, Corvus Review, Black Stone/White Stone and Spark to flame among other magazines and he’s very pleased to be in BRAWL lit! Shortlisted for the inaugural The Brilliant Poetry prize (www.thebrilliantpoetry.com/shortlist).
Why this Knocked Taylor Out:
This is a wonderfully crafted poem whose detail work and intricacy delighted me when it came into the BRAWL inbox.
The ending of "of birds she ate, to birth nothing." aligned well with the ethos of the poem and leaving the reader to do a little more work. Are there no birds because god is dead? Are there no birds because they’ve all been eaten? Is the speaker crying because the mirror is giving an image that doesn’t reflect who they are inside? The sound work on "bird" and "birth" gave it a ringing ending, so even though the poem says "no bells" earlier, the slant rhyme allows for the music of the bells to enter!
Some cool craft things I want to highlight: the line endings and beginnings are putting a lot of pressure on each other in this poem. “will sing. I am called to mass by silence, forced” is a great example.
I also love apophasis and always have. The “poem with no birds” and then filling a poem with song and birds and breadcrumbs is super compelling for me.
Luca is also a poet who has submitted to us a few times before getting an acceptance which I think is worth highlighting. We LOVE seeing familiar names in the inbox and when we ask you to submit again we really mean it!
Interview:
Why did you choose Team Taylor for this poem?
Why, you ask? Memories of religious rituals from my Sardinian countryside, supposed disappearance of animals, surreal imagery. All of these seem to be things Taylor enjoys, so it was a no brainer for me. I have been submitting to her for a while now, and I felt the vibes were right: even rejections transpired kindness and care! I am glad (and honoured) Taylor vibed back to this piece.
The apophasis (speaker brings up the subject by denying the subset) of the poem is really working well for me, how did you go about working in the idea of a "poem with no birds" and how did that allow the poem to form?
I am a poet obsessed with birds, and when my subconscious tries to communicate with the conscious, usually birds fly to the page. Lately, however, I am struggling with a sense of helplessness for the state of the world, something I don’t know how to communicate (or even recognise within myself,) perhaps because of the intensity of the emotions, or just the sheer weight of the events: wherever I look, I feel conflict, and I fear that evil is winning. I think of birds as friends, as guidance, but I don’t seem to find respite in them lately, I feel abandoned, that they gave up on me (and us). With hope gone, I started to explore this sense of void, the emptiness left behind their extinction. I imagined a world with no birds, and that was the beginning of the poem. And yet, when I started to write, the birds came back, via reflections, behind mirrors, and other forms of slant presence, felt absence. I tried to ground myself more in the realities around me, like the two magpies that sometimes come to my window, the memory of my religious youth; I let myself get transported in the soundscape and the surreal images that emerged. And while I fear a resolution is still far in this poem, (grief is too loud, and birds are too quiet,) I also have faith that birds have not lost all hope on us yet. The apophasis was a way of creating a sort of reverse image. By focusing on what was not there, I could shift my attention towards what was. The denial of birds forced me to examine the other elements of the poem. It allowed me to explore the emotional and spiritual landscape through its absences, making the poem a reflection on loss and the search for meaning in a world that feels empty of good.
How did you revise this poem to get to this version?
I wish I could say more about this! This is one of the poems that had the fewest revisions ever for me. I started with a note about the sounds of the magpies at my window, which feature in many of my poems, did a brief freewriting on one of the many notebooks I carry around when I strut in the city and then I forgot about these notes. I don’t remember exactly when, but let’s say at the end of January, I found these notes again, and I felt reinspired (unfortunately) by the news, and started to wonder about the disappearance of the birds. I usually do a lot of automatic writing before writing, and I had two whole pages of these! After a few days, I transferred the note on a word processor and started refining and reshaping what I had on the page, really chiselling away superfluous generalisations (sorry some and all, you did not serve me here!) and really delving into the subconscious again to find the images who could translate my feelings on the page. Then, just two more revisions, to fix the tenses (yeah, I still don’t get these most of the time), and let the solid form of the poem emerge: yet end words, line breaks and images stayed pretty much the same throughout. I guess that’s what happens when you work with subconscious writing. Also, a line has dropped in the last version, thanks to the careful reading of Taylor, to keep the focus of the poem on the absence of birds.