Are Wings Really What You Want – a poem by Bethany Reid

 
Are Wings Really What You Want

or is it only their drenched-in-light

feeling, that lightness? 
When the dead press their faces

against the window, do you wish
you could join them, 

a white moth, fluttering? 
At sunrise, do you praise all

the day can become? When you walk
the quiet or unquiet streets 

do you remember you are more 
than half in the sky, 

which begins at the soles
of your feet? What taught you

today? What wishes were you granted?
Wasn’t your deepest desire

kept safe within you? 
Wasn’t that the breath of God

ruffling your wings?

Bethany Reid’s stories, essays, and poems have recently appeared in One Art, Poetry East, Quartet, Passengers, Adelaide, Kithe, Descant, Peregrine, and Catamaran. Her fourth full-length collection of poems, The Pear Tree, won the 2023 Sally Albiso Award from MoonPath Press and is due out this winter. She lives in Edmonds, Washington, and blogs about writing and life at http://www.bethanyareid.com.