Katharyn Howd Machan
Hooded
What bird will you be when you are reborn?
…………I will be a Roman crow.
What song will you sing each holy night?
…………No song. I will allow no music.
What feather will you drop when the wild child hopes?
…………No feather. Never. They will all belong to me.
What fence will you perch upon when the season calls?
…………It must be made of iron black as my long flight.
What death will you eat at dawn?
…………That of the wild child’s mother. She will smile at me.
What name will Satan call you when you dare to caw?
…………Good priest. His soul’s savior. My beak a gleaming sword.
…………All fear will lean toward me for I shall be its Lord.
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Since 1977 Katharyn Howd Machan, picking up where Rod Serling left off, has taught creative writing at Ithaca College in the Finger Lakes region of New York State. Her specialty courses, besides in poetry and memoir, have been Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy, Women and Fairy Tales, and first-year seminars called Fairy Tales: The Hero’s Journey. Her poems have appeared in many magazines, anthologies, and textbooks, and in 40 published collections, most recently A Slow Bottle of Wine (winner of the Jessie Bryce Niles Award from The Comstock Writers, Inc., 2020) and Dark Side of the Spoon (The Moonstone Press, 2022).
Backstory & Author’s Comments: This poem arose from working with an image on a card in The Crow Tarot. I enjoy creating call-and-response poems from such cards, letting my fancy fly free.
For this poem I also drew upon my recollection of seeing crows when I visited Rome in January of 2024.
Editor’s Comments and Image Credit: The image was created with the input of “an image of an evil phoenix rising with the face of a crow and a steel beak” to an image generator (Wixel by Wix.com).