This island’s blue canopy of camouflaged clouds
impaled by the Olympics’ sawtooth smile
flutters with tons of cold gray steel,
with birds my neighbor boy flies in the dark,
birds my neighbor boy trusts in to save
us both from a nuclear sun.

Loving thy neighbor is easy, flapping my eyes
at his faded cut hair, poking my beak at brown desert boots
that carry his heart to foreign lands
where new nests of harm and regret are made
by powerless creatures of flight, creatures like me,
the son of a bird whose father loved his neighbor, the sky.