THE FABLE

(a retelling of the poem PUNGENT)

There are many details to a story.  

Like the part where the shaman says

Take your brother to the water,

This is what your grandmother, on the other side, wants.

Or the part where the bird with the broken wing,

Found on the freeway, is calmed by the carpenter’s voice,

As he reads Jonathan Livingston Seagull out loud.

Or the part where the bloke with the heavy heart

Prays by pouring water into the Bay.

Or the part where a bridge or a prison

Appear symbolically and actually.

But when it comes to this story, the one 

I’ve been telling you about, as if it were 

A fractured fable, all you really need to know

Is that the man on the shoreline wept

And the bird with the broken wing

Paddled safely out to sea.