Claudia Ann Seaman Award
And the Crows Laughed
Sofia Miller
San Diego, CA
Westview High School
Poetry
We climb that half-house in Ramona
like we climb everything else here:
breathless, unaware, & Look—how close I am to the sun.
We leave the little one on Earth. He squirms, begs
to tag along as we race up, up, away. We dart across that rooftop
like we were promised from birth the impossibility of falling.
The little one angers a sleeping rattlesnake when we come down. We run so far to our father, hardly checking the little ankle for teeth,
but our father simply takes the little one’s foot in his hand,
then looks up. Points to the crows, says:
Those will be the last things on Earth to fly.
EDITORIAL PRAISE
How we yearn to leave. What we leave behind. What we simply cannot leave: These are questions I ask and ask again. This poem is a breath of balance and a blip at the blunders of childhood naivety; when stumbling through life and tumbling on sodden ground, we reach for the sky but only find the crows laughing.
Sofia Miller is a senior at Westview High School in San Diego, California. She is the Art & Design Director for The Incandescent Review, and an alum of Kenyon Review Young Writers ‘19, where she saw fireflies for the first time. She will be graduating with the class of 2021.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR