a poem in my pocket

christmas should be the merriest day on the isles but i,
tiny feathered creature, must silence my celebration as i am
aware of the bloody tradition of st. stephen’s, the martyr, a
mere desecrated day after the holy day, when every student
of ritual hunting will practice taking deadly aim of
us, sweetly innocent singers we, wee little wrens.

source: https://unsplash.com/@jcotten

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“Baby Wrens’ Voices” by Thomas R. Smith

I am a student of wrens.
When the mother bird returns
to her brood, beak squirming
with winged breakfast, a shrill
clamor rises like jingling
from tiny, high-pitched bells.
Who’d have guessed such a small
house contained so many voices?
The sound they make is the pure sound
of life’s hunger. Who hangs our house
in the world’s branches, and listens
when we sing from our hunger?
Because I love best those songs
that shake the house of the singer,
I am a student of wrens.
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Melissa Lemay hosts dVerse poetics this week and prompts us to write poems related to animals and Christmas (not the usual animals associated with the Nativity). I wrote a "golden shovel" poem, ending each line with a word from phrase taken from Thomas R. Smith's poem above.