Transmigration Poem by Cathryn Hankla

Green leaves, water starved, clatter to red clay;
churned by hiking tread and horseshoes,
luck turned in all directions
forms a subtext marked by rich dung.
A clutter of ocher and yellow
touches the zing of one little maple's
red letters purpling in the fog, freckling with age.

This uncanny late afternoon singes
a deep cadmium hue
under gibbous shadow moon. Sunset
strikes a row of unmatched trees:
green, magenta-brown, next
one tree burns from the tips of its leaves
against a smoke-blue mountain.

For every missing leaf, for every soul's migration,
the wind returns a dark clattering
pair of wings. Eight years to the day,
my father's dead again.

The plaintive sound of scouts cawing
ahead of the figuration, the calamity.
Not silently, the unbeloved murmuration
shifts, enfolding midair its own formation,
spiraling upward, sideways, re-leafing the highest limbs,
film spooling backward leaf into bud.
We cannot go back; these are but birds.

Shadow birds mutter, nudge,
not singing, but shoving, pulsing, with annoying
churs and Hitchcock flaps.
With wild demands for equal perches,
they do battle in the air like Kingdom come,
one nation under the eye of the pyramid
and white droppings beneath the tree.

In his Great Leap Forward Mao Zedong
decided to murder Four Pests:
sparrows, flies, mosquitoes, rats.
He set each citizen, youngest to eldest, to ring sparrows
from limbs, clanging pots and soupspoon cymbals.
Not allowed to rest, to pause, to sleep,
exhausted birds dropped, hearts burst.

And when the last sparrow fell,
God knew it. Roll famine.

Beijing, August 2007:
after landslides, lightning, drought, citizens
must arm their nests, called to raise starling
"squadrons" to battle locust-terrorists.
A favorite pest turns hero. In a paper sack,
even a swarm of death weighs nothing.
Still, there is a long ways I must carry it.