Anagramming
—Sally Bliumis Dunn
Silent, the word
lifting off, only
its letters
in the white air
of the page, swirl,
rearrange,
then brighten
as though at dawn,
a flock of robins,
struggling to gather
in the wind;
anagram’s answer
lands on the lawn,
brown heads lowered
into thin green blades.
For burrowing worms,
they listen .
“Robins” by Leslie White, used with permission from the artist.
The Windhover
By Gerard Manley Hopkins
To Christ our Lord
American Kestrel: adult female taking flight. © William Jobes, PA, September 2008
Birdsong
—Joanie Mackowski
Bustle and caw. Recall the green heat
rising from the new minted earth, granite
and basalt, proto-continents shuffling
and stacking the deck, first shadows flung
from the ultraviolet haze. A fern
uncurls from the swamp, the microscopic furnace
of replication warms the world, one
becoming two, two four: exponential blossom.
Lush with collision, the teacup balance
of x and y, cells like balloons
escaping into the sky—then the dumbstruck
hour, unmoored by a river,
a first fish creeps to the land to marvel
at the monstrous buds of its toes. And stars
grow feet and walk across the years, into these dozing,
ordinary days, climbing the spine’s winding
stair, where crickets yawn and history spins.
Still Life with Three Bird’s Nests by Vincent van Gogh (on his 161st birthday).
What birds plunge through is not the intimate space
—Rainer Maria Rilke (Translated by Stephen Mitchell)
What birds plunge through is not the intimate space
in which you see all forms intensified.
(Out in the Open, you would be denied
your self, would disappear into that vastness.)
Space reaches from us and construes the world:
to know a tree, in its true element,
throw inner space around it, from that pure
abundance in you. Surround it with restraint.
It has no limits. Not till it is held
in your renouncing is it truly there.
Why I Need the Birds
—Lisel Mueller
When I hear them call
in the morning, before
I am quite awake,
my bed is already traveling
the daily rainbow,
the arc toward evening;
and the birds, leading
their own discreet lives
of hunger and watchfulness,
are with me all the way,
always a little ahead of me
in the long-practiced manner
of unobtrusive guides.
By the time I arrive at evening,
they have just settled down to rest;
already invisible, they are turning
into the dreamwork of trees;
and all of us together —
myself and the purple finches,
the rusty blackbirds,
the ruby cardinals,
and the white-throated sparrows
with their liquid voices —
ride the dark curve of the earth
toward daylight, which they announce
from their high lookouts
before dawn has quite broken for me.
A Multitude of Birds
—by Ron McFarland
Sing now the desperate dance of small birds.
Sing where the quail collect after snowfall,
the mud-gutted borders of roads where the last
hard grains of wheat lay heaped with the gravel.
Sing the wren’s last colorless song,
the solitary vireo’s slow cold slur
by the roadside sifting old brown bags
for crusts or breadcrumbs, or perhaps
among the shards of bright green glass
a sip of wine, a claret deep as blood.
Sing then the cunning of sparrows which look
like nothing but dark little rocks,
for they will endure, and the starling
whose song is the echo of anything,
and the waxwing, gregarious feeders.
Sing warblers and blackbirds perched on the edge
of winter with ice clinging fast
to their wings, with plentiful seed
lying deep, with songs frozen hard into words,
sing now the desperate dance of small birds.
A robin, wrens, bullfinches, blue tits and other birds sheltering in a snow storm; a flock of sparrows roosting in a winter landscape (a pair) each, by Harry Bright.
Dust of Snow
— Robert Frost
The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree
Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.
Eastern Hemlock (Tsuga canadensis), as illustrated in Trees of Indiana, by Charles Clemon Deam.
For more of March’s MudSongs, featuring poems by Cummings, Dickinson, Neruda, and others, click here.
Thaw
— Edward Thomas
Over the land freckled with snow half-thawed
The speculating rooks at their nests cawed
And saw from elm-tops, delicate as flower of grass,
What we below could not see, Winter pass.
Photo by Nita Jatar Kulkarni.
Two Pigeons
— Mary Jo Salter
They’ve perched for hours
on that window-ledge, scarcely
moving. Beak to beak,
a matched set, they differ
almost imperceptibly—
like salt and pepper shakers.
It’s an event when they tuck
(simultaneously) their pinpoint
heads into lavender vests
of fat. But reminiscent
of clock hands blandly
turning because they must
have turned—somehow, they’ve
taken on the grave,
small-eyed aspect of monks
hooded in conferences
so intimate nothing need
be said. If some are chuckling
in the park, earning
their bread, these are content
to let the dark engulf them—
it’s all the human
imagination can fathom,
how single-mindedly
mindless two silhouettes
stand in a window thick
as milk glass. They appear
never to have fed on
anything else when they stir
all of a sudden to peck
savagely, for love
or hygiene, at the grimy
feathers of the other;
but when they resume
their places, the shift
is one only a painter
or a barber (prodding a chin
back into position)
would be likely to notice.
Two poems by Hailey Leithauser.
Mockingbird
No other song
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Plate 21 of “Birds of America” by John James Audubon, depicting Mocking Bird.
O, She Says
O, she says (because she loves to say O),
O to this cloud-break that ravels the night,
O to this moon, its mouthful of sorrow,
O shallow grass and the nettle burr’s bite,O to heart’s flare, its wobbly satellite,
O step after step in stumbling tempo,
O owl in oak, O rout of black bat flight,
(O moaned in Attic and Esperanto)O covetous tongue, O fat fandango,
O gnat tango in the hot, ochered light,
O wind whirred leaves in subtle inferno,
O flexing of sea, O stars bolted tight,O ludicrous swoon, O blind hindsight,
O torching of bridges and blood boiled white,
O sparrow and arrow and hell below,
O, she says, because she loves to say O.
Bird
— Pablo Neruda
It was passed from one bird to another,
the whole gift of the day.
The day went from flute to flute,
went dressed in vegetation,
in flights which opened a tunnel
through the wind would pass
to where birds were breaking open
the dense blue air –
and there, night came in.
When I returned from so many journeys,
I stayed suspended and green
between sun and geography –
I saw how wings worked,
how perfumes are transmitted
by feathery telegraph,
and from above I saw the path,
the springs and the roof tiles,
the fishermen at their trades,
the trousers of the foam;
I saw it all from my green sky.
I had no more alphabet
than the swallows in their courses,
the tiny, shining water
of the small bird on fire
which dances out of the pollen.
Spokes & Petals 