Spirit of Myth, by Karla Daly

Hierarchical Birds, by Mark Rothko (USA, b. Latvia) 1942

​Spirit of Myth
 
Some things never change.
Take, for instance, 
the hierarchy of birds.
 
At the lowest level,
principalities, archangels, or angels
with brown and sheer white tail feathers 
rise out of layers of aqua.
 
Above them, a band of soil
flecked with gold and darkest brown
is scraped away by human hands. 
There, dominions, virtues, or powers 
bare their bellies, 
one broad and white
with roots or ribs—it's not for me to say--
another brown and gray 
stippled with orange
as if part of the earth.
 
Their heads are in the haze of heavens,
brushstrokes of pink and blue and white.
And this is where we leave the earth
with a gesture looping as on a frieze:
A red eye blinking back at me
where thrones and cherubim and seraphim
appear, unknowable.

Karla Daly

Karla Daly is a third-year MFA Creative Writing candidate at American University and has worked in various editorial capacities for many years. Her poetry has appeared in District Lines, The Prose-Poem Project, and Alimentum: The Literature of Food, and she was a co-winner of The Phillips Collection’s Lupertz Poetry Challenge. She lives in Washington, DC.