Chris Murray’s “Early Summer” presents the season as a fragile, almost violent blooming: petals and birds fall together, and that falling brings death close. The speaker stands over a small dead bird, while a pine tree’s dark needles seem to dignify the body like a keeper of souls. A living bird nearby trembles when a passing shadow touches it, linking the living creature to the one already lost. At dawn the mood turns hushed and elegiac. Daisies seem to nod in mourning, the dead bird’s chest looks like an exposed birdcage on wet grass, and an open wing rests like a supplicant’s glove before the rising sun. The speaker’s feeling is not dramatic grief but quiet awe—an awareness of how much beauty, loss, and reverence can meet in one small death at the edge of summer.
Early Summer — Summary
Early summer occurs in a calamity of falling young petals, birds, the bright souls of birds.
A small dead bird is at my feet, tree looms over this soul-ossuary dignifying the small body with her dark needles, bird-map-lost Obliterate—
A small mourning shadow passes over grass, just long enough to hide the living bird, shadow moves against it tipping it to a tremble, as if it were fly-flicked, wing-tipped.
it is dawn, the nodding daisies mourn. bent arc of its chest, a birdcage laid bare on dew drenched grass. one velvet tipped glove is open, supplicant on the altar of the rising sun.