Picture it: that scrawny gamboge ratite,
drilling at a clump of greens with her paperhat beak.
The bones of her parents lie on the far mesa,
rent by cayotes then picked clean
by little birds and insects - strange, irridescent things
for whom legs are a convenience
rather than a necessity, who lift like silver cloches
when predators gallop towards them,
ringing as they rise into the sky.
These wings, that once carved the wind,
carrying her ancestors between land-masses,
grown blunt with disuse.
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