Feathers

John Cullen

We carried a canvas bag for mallards
slack in their feathers, limp as liquid velvet.
Now there’s so much shot percolating the marsh
the state tests water for particles worrying
lead concentrations brew retardation.
Fifty years ago my brother bumped his trigger
climbing under barbed wire. One pellet lodged in my thigh.
Too ashamed, we never confessed our negligence.
I’ve lived with the scar and occasional night itch.
My brother and I worry the bone of that day, the sound
of pellets ripping cattails, the direction
of children who break cover and take flight,
and the futility of a father’s duty to dislodge
the pebble sleeping in his child’s right shoe.
Water slopped the tops of our boots
as we waded wetlands, never noticing the world’s
feathers drifting toward us in the sunlight.