First comes the smell
Tinged sweet and bitter, it ravages the circling flock
Mid-flight, the Big Brother turns and the rest follow him -
The runt among them watches them swoop
On the mount beneath the rising smoke, they glimpse it;
The faint black spot that would become their meal.
As they march toward their target,
Scaled feet dance lightly through smoldering waste.
They claw at the ashes of a forgotten roost.
Old picture frames line the remaining walls,
Illuminated by ruined faces.
Though covered in blackened dust and soot,
The dead man’s face shows no resistance to the flames.
With sunken eyes and slacked-open mouth,
He had long ago embraced a long rest.
The siblings show no concern for his corpse,
No solemn wake to be held by its side.
A nudge from Big Brother’s beak asserts satisfaction.
Soon, the feast begins.
Black feathers leap from thrashing bodies
Colliding in savage mirth and frenzy.
A corpse’s ruined appearance betrays its contents’ richness.
The vultures pick and claw and pierce and tear,
Rivers of blood welling up at their feet.
But the devourers’ scurrying proves too violent,
and their smallest runt is shoved away -
Back unto the fallen beams and crumbling walls
Of a lonesome, long-forgotten home.
Amidst the remains of a life built and toppled,
Lived and died in by one who walked alone,
The runt looks forth with a rumbling stomach.
This meal, like all the last, had been snatched by his brothers,
Leaving him to feed on their prey’s burnt regrets.
Enveloping the runt, the ruined home burns cleanly
And lays bare the secrets of its creation.
The hermit sought a haven from past pains and failures,
But the runt now sees only a prison.
The roosts of vultures share little with the homes of men,
Though they can burn and fall much the same.
No rotting spots in their vicinity decide man’s future,
Nor does a library of faces stain a vulture’s past.
As the brothers disperse from the bones of the recluse,
The runt knew what he had always wondered.
Though he could not eat among his brothers -
And, indeed, they ate without him -
The runt knows its place is with them.
Better to starve with his kin than to cast them away,
The runt’s surroundings embolden his resolve.
Lest he die somewhere alone, left to wait for the worms
Without even a family to eat him.
Matias Grimoldi Calo is a Junior majoring in Illustration at the School of Visual Arts. Matias is most interested in work that explores unsettling and introspective subjects, and his poem "Vultures" focuses on anxieties pertaining to companionship and death.