Somewhere in the word casualty is the word casual,

and what they share is chance, the accident,

the unexpected interval, the arbitrary nature

of the natural: or unnatural, like the woman

in the picture in the news, her face obscured,

her covered head half-bowed as if in prayer,

whose right arm is severed at the shoulder

from a car bomb in a marketplace in the Al Jabbar

suburb of old Baghdad, who becomes the captured

soldier beheaded in the district of Dahana-ye

Ghori in a province in the north, Afghanistan.

And so on, as reported: people once collateral

cut to size or killed, turning little death

to larger death then back again to small,

only, by tomorrow, the paper they were printed on.

Meanwhile, the birds, the blackcaps, the fan-tails

and fifty names or more of other warblers,

plus owls and hawks and golden orioles,

lamented if not prized for their beauty

or their song, are missed by the thousands,

maybe millions, in Cyprus and in general

the Aegean, where they're caught in traps

of lime-sticks and mist-netting: hard to believe

the animal need for protein from something

hardly hand-sized and literally light as feathers.

Or is it the feather in the voice we're after,

the secret of the chip, the chir, the tew,

or the feather in the cap, the sign of victory?

Birds in the billions, the elegant article says,

"flooding up from Africa…avian populations"

becoming, bird by bird, "sub-optimal."