In Chris Murray’s “Early Summer,” the season announces itself not as soft unfolding but as a “calamity of falling / young / petals, birds, the / bright souls of birds.” The line breaks drop the reader from image to image, so that petals, birds, and their bright souls all tumble together. At its centre, the poem refuses to separate early summer’s liveliness from its losses: the season is a threshold where beauty is threaded with death, and even the smallest body deserves a ritual of mourning.
The poem then grounds that abstract calamity in one image: “A small dead bird / is at my feet.” The statement is deliberately plain, yet what follows enlarges it. A tree “looms / over this soul-ossuary / dignifying the small / body with her dark needles.” The word “ossuary” turns the ordinary ground into a storehouse of bones, while the tree becomes a presiding figure, part mourner and part priest. Its “dark needles” suggest an evergreen’s foliage but also the instruments of consecration. The strange compound “bird-map-lost” and the isolated “Obliterate—” read as both epitaph and command: the dead bird’s migratory sense, its inner map, is cancelled, and the poem itself seems to want to erase the sight even as it preserves it.
A turn comes with movement. “A small mourning / shadow passes over grass, / just long enough to hide the living bird.” Here grief is no longer stationary; it travels, briefly covering another bird. The shadow makes the living body “tipping it to a tremble, / as if it were fly-flicked, / wing-tipped.” Those compound verbs—“fly-flicked,” “wing-tipped”—mimic the quick, nervous flinch of a bird aware of something passing over it. The living bird is touched by death’s shadow without being caught, which makes the poem’s mourning both intimate and fleeting.
As dawn arrives, the natural world joins the lament: “the nodding daisies mourn.” The dead bird’s chest becomes “a birdcage / laid bare on dew / drenched / grass.” The line break after “dew” isolates “drenched,” letting the wetness soak into the image. A birdcage is usually a container, but here the chest is an empty one, its inhabitant gone. Finally, “one velvet tipped glove is open, / supplicant on the altar of the rising sun.” The wing—soft as velvet, shaped like a glove—opens upward as if in prayer. The grass beneath the body becomes an altar, and the rising sun becomes the power to which the small corpse is offered. This transformation gives the death a strange dignity: the bird is not just litter on a lawn but a supplicant at dawn.
Murray’s free verse works through short, weighted lines and surprising compounds: “soul-ossuary,” “bird-map-lost,” “fly-flicked,” “velvet tipped.” The short lines create a hesitating, almost ceremonial rhythm, each break a pause where the eye lingers on “young,” “bright,” “drenched.” There is no rhyme, but the sounds echo internally—“calamity” and “falling,” “souls” and “ossuary,” “mourning” and “mourn.” The lowercase “it is dawn” after the pause of “wing-tipped” keeps the poem flowing like one continuous perception rather than a tidy sequence. This style matters because the poem is doing something difficult: holding together violence and tenderness, decay and dawn. It turns a small dead bird into a figure of consequence, treating early summer as a season of precarious bright souls. In doing so, it asks the reader to look closely at what is easily overlooked—a body on wet grass, a passing shadow—and to recognize that grief and light often arrive together.