Roman Mosaic Birds, by Nan Cohen

Fragment of a Mosaic with Birds (Italy) 3rd or 4th century A.D.

Roman Mosaic Birds

Though the mosaic-makers lost
exactness of species--
the colours of stone or glass
and the colour of birds
rarely meeting—they found
the essential
posture, the attention

of each bird in its
singing or feeding or flight;

their sight residing
in the crazed energy of these fragments
despite mineral stillness
—let me, in midlife, take their art
for an emblem of 
how I see,
beneath antiquity’s familiar pallor,
brilliant feathers.

Nan Cohen
​
Nan Cohen is the author of two books of poems, Rope Bridge (2005) and Unfinished City (2017), and a chapbook, Thousand-Year-Old Words, forthcoming from Glass Lyre Press. Recent work has appeared in The Missouri Review, The Cortland Review, The Inflectionist Review, ROOM: A Journal of Analytic Action, The Los Angeles Review, Amsterdam Quarterly, and The Journal of the American Medical Association, and is forthcoming in DMQ Review, Ruminate, and The Commuter. She has received an NEA Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award, and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship for poetry, and is currently the poetry program director of the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, a summer writers’ conference in northern California. She lives in Los Angeles.