Fickle Bird a poem about the creative urge

When I think of the creative imperative, that insistant urge that drives all types of endeavors, I visualize the smal bird described below in the poem Fickle Bird

Fickle Bird
by Daniel Noll

This fickle bird I've seen before

It has it's precedent

It can turn life inside out

Reveal the workings of all things

Open one eye and blind the sun

With the other make the insane wise

Or follow the path of a molecule of ink

Through a glass of water.

With it's delicate beak tear through the earths crust

and in the next moment pick out that particular grain of sand

From the wind blown Sahara.

With one tiny clawed foot pick a whole galaxy

Out of it's place in the universe.

It's chirpping can drown out a choir of angels in full voice

Sentence men to perdition

Order nations about

All this..yet it is so very shy

It flutters on its perch

The air turns to froth

Boulders fall from the sky

It flutters again and

The veins of the sun pop out

Fire flows to the earth from the tips of it's wings

It can dissolve common sense in a good man

Create whole religions from a childs storybook

Indict and absolve

Fury and beauty

All from the fluttering of it's tiny wings

Dispite it's small size

It is a voracious consumer of humanity

Men or women and their families

and all their households, fortunes and futures

It is a sad tyrant, well beloved monarch

God and Devil, Angel and Demon

Feed it at great risk for

It can regurgitate whole nations out it's tiny gut

Let it sit on your finger

Maybe it will only occupy a shoebox size space

High up in the bedroom closet,

Having sung it's song elsewhere.

Or it may make your whole house it's residence

And order you about

It may just sit and shit on your best china

And expect you to clean it up - over and over.

It may do that for years till the house and yard

Are piled high with the refuse of this tiny bird

And the neighbors move away.

The authorities may come and you explain

About this little bird and it's capacity to consume and shit.

You show it to them

It sits grey and silent

They ask you why, why keep this tiny bird of devastation?

And you explain that someday it may sing a little song.

They leave you alone after that.

Right after they leave you hear it.

Tinkling notes that become ponderous

with the sound of stomping men marching down the street

Delicate fluttering sounds like dancers feet

Great brushstrokes of sound

The ringing sound of steel on wood and stone

High-hatted men orating

Delicate fingers filling the air with fury and chaos

Hard crude fingers with rose petal sounds

At last it settles down and I dare to open the door

To where the little bird dwelt

But the little bird had fled

I cleaned up the mess it made

I sat, exhausted, glad it had gone

I tried to remember the tunes it sang and wished it back