POEM: Ten more reasons to come back as a pelican

By Laurel Blossom

Kafka said a book must be an axe for the frozen sea within us.

Because pelican means axe.

Even if you don’t believe in it, wouldn’t you like to come back as something useful?

Something in this life you loved? Like poetry?

Because pelicans fly in lines.

Because they skim the waves like daggers, plunge into the ocean’s chest.

Scoop its flopping, meaty heart out.

Because they can eat their dinner in one gulp without getting arrested.

Because they sit on the dock all day, wasting time like Otis Redding.

Because they can’t do what ten people tell them to do either.

Because I want to live at the beach.

Because I love to watch them come in for a landing.

They say that pelicans go blind in the end and die because they can’t feed themselves.

Because it’s not true. I don’t care.

Because I’ve already made that decision:

Like Edna St. Vincent Millay and Montaigne, I’d rather be able to hear than see.

Except you, my love. You are beautiful and dangerous.

Like the grey wolf with its yellow eyes.

Or oleander, first flower of Hiroshima, poison.

Snake in the grass, you serpent, adder – I am dying, Egypt, dying –

Flights of pelicans sing me to my rest.

Laurel Blossom is the newly-appointed, first-ever Poet Laureate of Edgefield. Her new book, a book-length narrative prose poem called Longevity, will be published by Four Way Books in October.