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Moon Sun Shadow Crow

by Fran Wilde in Uncanny Magazine Issue Fifty-Eight | 239 Words

    
A crow crosses each road twice:
shadow and shadow cast.
    
A crow steals gems and
light filled foils, this crow
    
lifts each spoil high, holds it
as the sun holds a crow, captured.
    
But today’s sun is moon-chased.
This crow sees its large god, stalked
    
by a smaller one, spun skyward.
And this crow gets ideas.
    
The crow waits tree nestled
as moon bites sun,
    
Spills gems groundward
turns trees ghostlit,
    
The crow has a hunter’s plan
sung beak bound, crow
    
caws, catches moon, catches
shadow’s circle, mouthbound, crow
    
bites, dark as feathers
and struts the dim road,
    
a god of gathered things.
    
The sky spins, the trees,
bark and root, leaf and stem,
    
edge bright again
and this crow’s moon slips loose,
    
spills down the world’s edge.
This crow shakes feathers straight,
    
as small god turns skybound bird:
shadow and shadow cast.

 

(Editors’ Note: “Moon Sun Shadow Crow” is read by Erika Ensign on the Uncanny Magazine Podcast, Episode 58B.)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

© 2024 Fran Wilde

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Fran Wilde

Fran Wilde

Two-time Nebula Award-winner Fran Wilde has (so far) published nine novels, a poetry collection, and over 70 short stories for adults, teens, and kids. Her stories have been finalists for six Nebula Awards, a World Fantasy Award, four Hugo Awards, four Locus Awards, and a Lodestar. They include her Nebula- and Compton Crook-winning debut novel Updraft, and her Nebula-winning, Best of NPR 2019, debut Middle Grade novel Riverland. Her short stories appear in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Tor.com, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Nature, Uncanny Magazine, and multiple years’ best anthologies. “Clearly Lettered in a Mostly Steady Hand,” (Uncanny, 2017), was a finalist for the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy Award, and won the 2018 Eugie Foster Memorial Award. “A Catalog of Storms” (Uncanny, 2019) was a 2020 Hugo and Locus finalist and a 2019 Nebula finalist, and “Unseelie Brothers Ltd.” (Uncanny, 2021) was a 2022 Hugo finalist.

The co-editor for The Sunday Morning Transport, Fran teaches or has taught for schools including Vermont College of Fine Arts’ MFA and St. Mary’s College of Maryland. She writes nonfiction for publications including The New York Times, NPR, and Tor.com. You can find her on Instagram, Bluesky, and at franwilde.net.

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