Pieces of Clear Dawn

Every time, they look like sky,

Especially to someone

Raised where they didn’t exist,

Who first remembers seeing

One in a dark pine forest

On a visit to the west,

A slight, sudden flash of sky

In a thin shaft of sunrise.

Winged bit of Indian sky,

The Muskogee Creek poet

Alexander Posey wrote

Of one, twelve decades before,

In a homesick epigram

For whatever lost heaven

Of home the bird had strayed from,

Long before you had been born

To have the thought that mountain

Bluebirds throw pieces of dawn.