Meet high-schooler and poet, Anya Van Arnam! Anya participated in our Badgerdog Creative Writing Summer Camp at Headwaters School this summer. Her poem, featured below, offers a meditation on bird species classification and interrogates the social structures of our world. Another poem by Anya, titled “I Am Proud to Call Her My Nana,” will be published in the forthcoming edition of Emerge: Youth Voices in Ink. She will read from the anthology at the Badgerdog Young Authors Reading on October 27!
What Is It?
it’s a spinning circle
we love to hate
we hate to love
it’s a dove’s cry
upon misty morns
in white valley landscapes
it’s a pigeon’s coo
upon no morning
for no morning exists
in a city that has no seasons
the dove and the pigeon
both are birds
both have wings
both can fly
but one perches on the highest oak
one pecks for scraps
one lives long
in its white feathered glory
one is slain in the gutter
the dove and the pigeon
both are birds
both have wings
both can fly
but one flies no more
this one once free?
this one now captured
seen by (what we call a God above)
as ugly
as dumb
lower
the pigeon is not these school house
barn house
white house
insults
that we love to hate
we hate to love
both can coo
both can squawk
both can be quiet
or run amok
and cause terror in trampling feet
yet the feet still walk in a circle
becoming a buzzing background
while the doves
argue on skyscraper mountains
about where to dispose
(not disclose!)
the pigeon carcasses
now the skyscrapers
have black foundations
painted over in titanium white
our eyes are painted blind
our ears muffled
by the buzzing
there is no quiet
only white bees
drained of honey
Anya Van Arnam
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