Tag: Poetry About Birds

Gerald Friedman: “Bird-banding at Camp”

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine 

Bird-banding at Camp
 
The counselors had no bands
that fit a hummingbird,
but should one get
caught in the mist net,
you rattled it between cupped hands 
until it lay in your palm
(unhurt, we were assured)
with a quiet that seemed, except for its heartbeat, calm.
 
Then everyone who might
admired its smallness, red
enamel throat,
wings a green suitcoat,
but suddenly it took flight,
slid steeply up a ramp of air
full-powered, pivoted
in the leaves to a hopeful gap and sped out of there.
 
God! to feel
my head clear
for good, to recognize
the windy or waiting skies
are real,
to get out of here.

About the Author: Gerald Friedman grew up in the suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio, and now teaches physics and math in northern New Mexico.  He has published poetry in various magazines, recently Rat’s Ass Review, The Daughter’s Grimoire, W-Poesis, and Cattails.  You can read more of his work at https://jerryfriedman.wixsite.com/my-site-2

Image Credit: Public domain image originally from Histoire naturelle des oiseaux-mouches, ou, Colibris constituant la famille des trochilidés. Lyon: Au Bureau de la Société Linnéenne,1874-1877. Courtesy of the Biodiversity Heritage Library.

Paula Reed Nancarrow: “The Names of Birds”

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine 

The Names of Birds

My mother and the birds:
we watch them at the feeder.
I call out their names.

Look mom! The blue jay’s back!
That one! she says. That one!!
And the red-headed woodpecker–

Such a big…nose thing…
Yes, he has a long beak. And there are the
chickadees, the little nuthatches

and the turtledoves, grey and homely
their sound all the beauty they own.
Then the red-winged blackbird – Mom, look!

They’re a sign of spring.
That will never – she says…. 
Oh yes, my love. And the robin too. It will come. You will see it. 

All the names she has forgotten
I recite like a litany: a prayer to the birds, distinct and various
as the language slipping away. 

Good bye to wingéd words.
I say the names of birds; she does not repeat them. 
Nor do I ever hear the name I own.

About the Author: Paula Reed Nancarrow’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ballast, Hole in the Head Review, and Book of Matches,  among other journals.  She is a past winner of the Sixfold Poetry Prize and her poems have been nominated for Sunrise Publications’ Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. Find her at paulareednancarrow.com. 

Image Credit: Public domain image originally from La galerie des oiseaux. Paris, Constant-Chantpie,1825-1826. Courtesy of the Biodiversity Heritage Library.

Cheryl A. Rice: “Crow Will Never Carry A Star Across the Sky”

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine 
Crow Will Never Carry A Star Across the Sky
                            -for MJ

“It’s not my job to carry a
self-sufficient body from dawn to dawn.
I’ve got enough on my mind,
what with gathering foodstuffs to tide me over,
making a nest sturdy enough to withstand
kith and kin, raw eggs, new babies.
Stars live lives beyond all that,
provide the only possible light 
in that seamless backdrop.

It’s not a matter of choice, no choice about it at all.
Check with Blue Jay, busy bullying inbred Sparrows,
or Cardinal, flitting like a match head from bush to bush,
playing the family man so well you can almost see a
station wagon full of chicks behind him.
Goldfinch, Red-Headed Stranger,
elusive Bluebird of Happiness—
maybe one of them has time
to cart a star around there like some aged queen.

I’ve got my own agenda,
make my own rounds without help
from a creature subject to laws of gravity.
Leave me be. I’ve got a Douglass fir to investigate.
Something is shining on that uppermost branch that calls to me,
seems to be spelling my name in semaphoric signs.”

About the Author: Twice a Best of the Net nominee, Cheryl A. Rice’s books include Dressing for the Unbearable (Flying Monkey Press), Until the Words Came (Post Traumatic Press), and Love’s Compass (Kung Fu Treachery Press). Her monthly column, The Flying Monkey, can be found at https://hvwg.org/, while her occasional blog, Flying Monkey Productions, is at http://flyingmonkeyprods.blogspot.com. Rice can be reached at dorothyy62@yahoo.com.

Image Credit: Kazimierz Stabrowski “Crows- Council of Seniors” (1923) Public domain image courtesy of Artvee

Cord Moreski: “Casual Friday”

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine 
Casual Friday


When the evening arrives
John next door goes by 
the name Lady Flamingo 

and puts away the expensive suit 
for a dress with sequins and feathers

hides his neatly combed hair 
beneath curls of a pink wig 

and trades in the quietness of his dress shoes 
for the authority of eight-inch heels

he works business in the city by day 
until business becomes hers by night.

This morning I hold the entrance door 
for him while we both leave for work 

sporting another Brooks Brothers suit 
he tells me it’s Casual Friday 
as he points to the pink flamingo on his tie.

About the Author: Cord Moreski is a poet from the Jersey Shore. Moreski is the author of Confined Spaces (Two Key Customs, 2022), The News Around Town (Maverick Duck Press, 2020), and Shaking Hands with Time (Indigent Press, 2018). When he is not writing, Cord waits tables for a living and teaches middle school children that poetry is awesome. His next chapbook Apartment Poems will be released by Between Shadows Press in late 2022. You can follow Cord here: www.cordmoreski.com

Image Credit: Chase Dimock “LA Flamingo” (2021)

John Macker: “Epilogue”

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine

.

20210626045458_IMG_1981

.

.

Epilogue

A pair of Cooper’s hawks
dive and explode the air
cleave the sky into uncharted territories
a frenzied cincture
a momentary communion that

admits the ground to the heavens
this first fresh autumn day has dissent
written all over it ⸺
wildflowers retreat defeated colors
fade into the middle of the earth again.

Looking up, grace is just myth rewired
silence broken into a million feathers
the practical hours and tamed
rivers lay beyond us just over
the Jemez mountains, I’m sure.

As swiftly and immodestly as they arrive
they vanish, their rhythms survive them
standing here in endangered open space
lone unknown interlocutor
their aromatic wind still in my face.

The words we say to each other now
are spirits in freefall, they search my
mind for place a holding pattern
how can the human heart remain sedentary?
Abandoned fabric of the sky they once

nuanced unravels      they won’t share the secrets
of being in the mystery      lizard bivouacked near
my boot, blinks away the sun’s engorged sparks
harvest moon rises like oblivious burning desire
an insatiable eye     a mute witness.

.

.

About the Author: John Macker grew up in Colorado and has lived in northern New Mexico for 25 years. He has published 13 full-length books and chapbooks of poetry, 2 audio recordings, an anthology of fiction and essays, and several broadsides over 30 years. His most recent are Atlas of Wolves, The Blues Drink Your Dreams Away, Selected Poems 1983-2018, (a 2019 Arizona/New Mexico Book Awards finalist), Desert Threnody, essays and short fiction (winner of the 2021 Arizona/New Mexico Book Awards fiction anthology prize), El Rialto, a short prose memoir and Chaco Sojourn, short stories, (both illustrated by Leon Loughridge and published in limited edition by Dry Creek Art Press.) In 2019, his poem “Happiness” won a Fischer Poetry Prize finalist citation, sponsored by the Telluride Institute.

.

More by John Macker:

Last Riff for Chet

Abundance

Nostalgia Poem

.

Image Credit: Chase Dimock “Sandia Peak, New Mexico” (2021)