Poetry by Mary Ann Honaker

Amrit Patel CC



OWL

Somewhere a man felt so lonely 
for the earth he came from, 
that when an owl crooned its three-note

tune he sang the song right back.  
For a year the man communed
with his unseen night muse, felt the world

alive around him and himself falling into it,
just as Paul was caught up to the Heavens,
whether in the body or out of the body

he could not say.  The earthquake that rent
the man from his birthmother, that unseen void,
healed up like a well-stitched wound.  

He recorded the owl so he'd have that bliss by day, too.
He conversed with night and night answered.
I can't imagine what the man felt when he learned

that it was only his neighbor hooting, both of them
inventing an owl and becoming an owl for the other.
To be sundered yet again, the holy revealed profane:

to sit alone with the clanks and beeps and whirs
of a household suddenly his all.  The night
receded to an opaque canvas window-framed. 


​

Mary Ann Honaker is the author of Becoming Persephone (Third Lung Press, 2019), and the chapbooks It Will Happen Like This (YesNo Press, 2015) and Gwen and the Big Nothing (The Orchard Street Press, 2020).  A new full-length collection, Whichever Way the Moon, is forthcoming from Main Street Rag.  She currently lives in Beaver, WV.