Sofia Drew
How to Build a Bird
(A Timeline)
I.
Two feathers,
a stone,
and the full force of four winds
inside time’s hollow bones
collided to form you.
II.
Back then everything was learning what it meant to begin:
a glacier split open and the ocean fell
from between its legs,
so any sound was a scream
for a mother.
III.
Everything that lives wants to fill space. What you have is endless.
The weight inside is the same as outside.
It is a liberty to turn
the sky at an intimate angle.
IV.
All the questions you need are inside your body:
green eye or sea of ice,
starve or flight path,
and how fast the egg slips
into the tides.
V.
Each moment freezes over
into the next.
A snowfall in rings around you
telling you it’s time
to empty the nest.
The Four Times of Day
after Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot
Sitting behind the blue sky is a brown sky
and underneath, the figure in a red cap wakes up,
dips a shoulder to the ground to greet the birches
as everything is unburied by the yellow light.
Another twist and the figure in a red cap is up
beside us, as the sun lies on our backs
burrowing its yellow light into our heads,
so we can watch as the birches try to rest
their branches on the blue-brown sky.
The sun lies on its back behind us,
as we stumble by the mouth of the river
where the birch branches are floating belly-up,
and the figure in a red cap waits to ferry us across.
Out of the mouth of the river, we dip into
a place where colours grow into shades
while way across, the figure in the cap waves
as everything is unburied by the grey light.
Sofia Drew lives in Te Whanganui-a-Tara where she is studying Philosophy and English Literature. You can find more of her work in Symposia and Salient. She would like you to know that for Bird of the Year she voted for the kākā, kōkako, and pohowera.