Aeolian

Poem

By Ranen Tan

A hatchling beckons,

mounted on wingtips of grace

accreting its flight.

Like the twelve of the Dodecachordon,

not all orchestrated to take flight cry surrender

lasting under silver shekels or cock’s crow.

Some break bread and regret instead.

Name’s sake shared and muddled by three,

Aeolus as tempestuous, as incestuous,

his abode a dizzying splintering of self and divine

caged by bronze. Selah

Mourning in moonlight gives way to a 

flower bridging two chasms. Approaching,

indivisible, invisible, 

the wind that blows unchained, splitting seas.

Now it is the sublunary that splinters, as Elijah

taken up or spoken to in the whirlwind;

Our tongues now could move mountains when

planted under the shade of the mustard tree.

Still persists Odysseus’s folly, his companions of chaff

idly sailing by their own gales. They were tossed around,

an infuriating scheme of deadened faring,

even before the crushing of the east wind.

Light fills the skies. Angel-plumage at Bethlehem

sing joyous, decrying the grief, enchanting belief—

legacy lifted into a manger.

Love brought into unity at last, beyond sforzando.

The hatchling reckons,

fighting through tumbles and swoops;

the weight of becoming.

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Ranen Tan is a Fiction editor for Burnings. Find out more here.