text version
clutch
the light lingers.
dandelion parachutes
ride the warming air.
the toms gobble from the oaks.
something older than me
says now.
under the shadow of your nest,
where scout and wren play,
i find a hollow of little bluestem
and switchgrass.
i scratch the ground
a claw deep
and bed it
with what the trees shed.
you, the largest predator here,
and two dogs named carnage and savage,
keep the large ones back.
i lay one a sun
until there are enough.
then prolactin rises.
my breast feathers fall
among the leaves,
softening the bed,
and skin to shell
i stay
for nearly a moon.
the small ones still find me.
some count what is missing.
scout, wren, and i
count who i fed.
two for the raccoon
and her clever hands.
two for the rat snake,
who takes them whole.
one for the opossum's passel.
one for the skunk.
one for the crow,
and the crow again.
and one
rises from my clutch
in the clutch of a bald eagle,
the first to return to this land,
whose mothers' eggs
once broke beneath them,
whose mothers grew
on eggs like mine.
carried to its nest
above the pedernales,
part of me will fly
higher than i ever will.
the two or three left
learn my voice through the shell.
on the same day
each one turns inside,
cracks a circle
with a tooth it will lose,
and walks.
you carry them into the gym,
out of reach of hawk and owl,
until the poults are big enough
to come back to me.
my grandmothers came
in cardboard, by mail.
i hatched under this grass.
the wild ones forage with us now,
leaner, their feathers
tessellated bronze,
reading the sky
the way my mothers did
before the first hand fed us.
they came for what we stay for.
the prairie is full again.
some of it is me.
at dusk they rise with us
into the oaks,
i as high as my body allows.
we have no roof
but the leaves.
i lay enough
to hold
the flock and more.
as told by the heritage hen
to cindee travis klement
Roam Ranch, November 2026
from the listening in Enough to Hold
