Cornstalks and Crows

My Mom has a brilliant poem published in the latest issue of the literary journal, Persimmon Tree. I've reproduced the poem below, but please visit Persimmon Tree and read all the great writing there! http://www.persimmontree.org/

Cornstalks and Crows

Early in the morning in June
I walked out of our vacation adobe
Through a rabbit trail
Past the escusado
And stood with the toes of
My shoes just touching the
Edge of earth where it began
To crumble into the corn patch.
I began to blow into the plastic
Crow whistle I’d fished out of a
Kellogg’s Cornflake box.
I took a step back, blew air into the plastic whistle
My caws stretched over
the bent tassels and rustled
in the Green thicket until a crow, like magic,
Came from no where and landed
with a great black swoop just above my head
On the tallest corn plant.
And listened with glee as the crow answered back
and in one moment like a quickly descending storm
the air was black with the birds.
Blue wings glistening like a giant oil spill
That blotted out the rising sun
Until all I could see was black
And all I could hear was the riot
Of sound and the crushing of the entire field.

Farmers ran and swooped their flannel arms
but the crows had taken up residence as though they too
had sprouted from the earth.
I moved five steps back and watched as the entire
Crop was destroyed.

And sometimes even with the power of the heaviest regret
Things cannot be made right.
Sometimes the need to create and to destroy are as tightly
Bound as the weave of feather on wing.

The cloud of crow sometimes unbidden
But too often hailed by us
On the intake of breath
Sometimes we choose disaster.


Cooper Gallegos's family had a one-room adobe house in a small Mexican village where she spent summers as a kid. Her poem, “Cornstalks and Crows,” is written from a memory of that time. She has been published in Looking Back; What It's Like to Love a Woman; Sisters Singing; and she has read her work on Central Coast Public Radio. She is currently writing a collection of inter-linked stories set in the 1970's Mojave Desert. When not writing she makes “found art” from rusted metal she scavenges from the middle of nowhere.