They Are Looking Too
they are looking too
at the steady new snowfall
bush chickadees
Poems on the topic: bird
Poems on the topic “bird” on Poets.by.
One, Two, Three Crows
one, two, three crows
walk a branch
Blue Winter Sky
blue winter sky
the little peck holes
up a pine tree
Jail Mentality
Our jail mentality has us
observing the fatted Geese
lining the courtyard walls.
Black and white sentinels, guards,
while my celly and I thought:
the freedom of birds, flights
out of here, past the glass.
Breezes, the speed of clouds.
Out the Cell Window
Out the cell window
new year’s snow has melted
lazy bird flies south.
Still No Wind
Still no wind
this long dreary winter,
solitary bird.
Aid
At her western window, she's stitching.
The needle pricks her sometimes. She moves
Her hand aside to not bleed on silk.
Even as she works, her waxed thread in
Rows appearing like commas, she sees a
Western meadowlark pounce in tall grass
Ever growing, unmowed, outside. When
She stops, peering over thick lenses
To note the meadowlark has a grub, to her
Ears come, faintly, short songs of its mate.
Reaching for her scissors, she snips a tail,
Nudges it out of sight behind a stitch.
When this row is done, she'll ask her mate
If it will do. If not, she'll turn her mother's
Needle and pull thread, loop by loop
Down to the place her mind wandered.
It Is Quiet Out There
It is quiet out there now. She
Takes her hat, stick and forage bag,
Into which she slips her pruners, then
Slides her feet into green clogs, feeling
Quite exurban-agrarian, ready to look
Under brush piles and into cottonwoods --
In every place that might consent to harbor
Even a hint of birds' music. They have flown,
The silence tells her; those that haven't died.
Out along the roadside she waves to cars,
Understanding her neighbors have to drive,
Then pockets up her apples, rose hips, leaves
That now are turning away from green: cat's ear,
High mallow, chicory, plantain, sow thistle, her
Ears pricked for passing flights of geese.
Really, thinks she to herself, there ought
And Now It Sings
She stands in wet and likes it; drips rolling
around the brim of her split-bamboo conical
hat to fall on thirsting clay. Here's
weather at last, there having been sun,
sun, sun, a lip-cracking and tree-splitting
dry, since the vernal equinox. Nothing
had been vernal about it, and her land
knew so. The very fir limbs sulked;
willows on creek banks browned up and died;
birds fell everlastingly silent, dropping
on needle-sharp tufts of what had been haymow
beneath their perches in rattling cedars;
fish sought pools deeper than any there were,
crowding in together, fin by fin,
gulping and grunting, then rolling over
to bump along hot, slimed rocks and lodge
The Silent Lover
She sighs. What shall I say?
For beauty seems to grow
In silence, when the heart is faint and slow.
Sing, sing . . . How shall I sing?
In silent eyes, where clouds and islands gaze,
The waves bring Eros in.
I think the rustling of her clothes
Is like the sea, and she
A wild white bird,
And love is like the sighing of the sand.
The Troika
Troika, troika! The snow moon
whirls through the forest.
Where lamplight like a knife
gleams through a door, I see two graybeards bending.
They're playing chess, it seems. And then one rises
and stands in silence. Does he hear me passing?
Troika, troika! In the moonlight
his spirit hears my spirit passing.
I whip the horses on. The houses vanish.
The moon looks over fields
littered with debris. And there in trenches
the guardsmen stand, wind fluttering their rags.
And there were darker fields without a moon.
I walk across a field, bound on an errand.
The errand's forgotten — something depended on it.
A nightmare! I have lost my father's horses!
Aviary
The eight-year-old boy can’t reach the first branch of the
largest of a pair of Maples in the front yard so he settles
for the lowest branch of the smaller tree. He easily pulls
himself up into the first crotch and pauses there, planning
his route to the top of his favorite aviary. He knows each
branch like the back of his hand, every step, every
handhold. He starts to climb, one limb at a time.
As the boy ascends, the branches get smaller and more
flexible. He can feel himself now swaying gently in the
wind. He can almost (but not quite) poke his head out of
the leaves at the top of the tree before he’s forced to stop
climbing. Here he tucks a leg into the fork between two
branches and settles in.
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