Tag Archives: Birds

What is the Thing With Feathers and Where is it Now?

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I wanted to write a blog post about hope today.

About how it is different, but related to, expectation, and of how difficult it is to keep.

Of how I’m often not sure what hope is and often feel as if I have none.

And of how Emily Dickinson’s poem sometimes restores me in those moments when hope feels the most nebulous:

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I’ve heard it in the chillest land
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity
It asked a crumb of me.

Ah, the salve of poetry on the soul. Words strung in a certain and deliberate manner creating a feeling of centeredness amid confusion and chaos.

Dickinson’s couching an abstract idea like hope within the apt imagery of “feathers” and “tune,” “storm” and “chillest land” is, of course, why her poetry has withstood time and fashion to resonate with readers today.

And there are no more fitting or contemporaneous events than those which took place in Charlottesville, VA this past weekend to prompt contemplation on the subject again. To ask, what does hope stands for?

Not unlike Dickinson’s bird, I see hope as fleeting, at best, and while it may in fact sing a tune somewhere beyond the wind and clouds of whatever storm is blowing through life at the moment, I am generally too busy dodging rain drops and lightning strikes to think about it, much less hear it. 

I guess all that running around is a necessary function of survival. The ego keeping me from doing something stupid during a downpour that might get me killed. The fight or flight response to a life-threatening situation helping me to survive that situation.

There was a time I rather liked the excitement and danger of running around in storms. These days, though, I generally prefer to stay out of the wind and rain, if given the choice.

But since I am speaking in metaphor, the kinds of storms I really mean don’t stop just because I’m inside, and they certainly don’t care what my past may have taught me about surviving,

Or loving.

Or hoping.

And they almost always require that I leave the comforts of home.

Other times, it’s just a big old-shit storm.

I mean, something ugly and racist, hateful and riotous. Something that gains frenzied, savage energy with every violent projection and slur. Something that thrives in the absence of rational thought and perpetuates fear with architectural precision.

The kind of shit-storm expressly designed to extinguish the hope Dickinson envisions, the kind of hope I choose to believe in.

I don’t know where that little bird may be right now, maybe off somewhere singing its tune as Dickinson suggests. Maybe beyond the clouds, maybe even over a rainbow.

But for now, I’ve grabbed a pair binoculars.

For now, I’m watching out.

Releasing the Dark Landscape by Martin Willitts Jr

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The last sunlight falls behind the vanishing trees,
where it hesitates before leaving completely.
Some decisions are measured by regret.
Some of us, when we find ourselves old, notice this.

Out on the prairie, someone tries to hold the land
together with barbed wire stapled to aging wood posts.
however I am the kind of person who brings cutters
and snip each sharp wire, and let the fields open.

I am the kind who encourages yellow-throated meadowlarks.
When cut, the dark will be released; the air will be set free.
Doors on distanced houses ripple like muscles after working.
Some wonder why I do this, question idleness as the cause,

suggest I had nothing better to do. I am the kind laws
are made to discourage people like me from acting impulsively.
I cannot obey, and sharpen the blades like a raptor’s talons.
I am the kind that knows outcrops sweeten with silence.

I go to the wire to test it. It glints in moonlight and speaks.
It knows the quiet patterns of flight, the tactical for listening.
I should have brought the cutter, it slender purpose of justice,
the rusting wind caught on it should be freed. I touch barehanded.

It slices like eyes. It whispers, be careful. The fields, spare me.
Yearning and ceasing are shadows lengthening, in stillness,
in the final ambient light, then, the meadowlark stopped —
only the robin’s sleepy-time sound is in this field, and it is held here.

I experience the necessary absence. I also lose blood to its danger.
They say actions speak for you and what you stand for.
I have been listening to the suffering. Something had to be done.
When I cut, the earth flies away, like wings or leaves or regret.
___

Martin Willitts Jr. has 11 full-length collections including “How to Be Silent” (FutureCycle Press, 2016). His forthcoming include “Dylan Thomas and the Writing Shed” (FutureCycle Press); “Three Ages of Women” (Deerbrook Press); and the winner of the Editor’s Choice Award, “The Wire Fence Holding Back the World” (Turtle Island Press).

Water’s Edge by Joe Amaral

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I came upon a creek,
following deer trail scampering by
fire-swirled poison oak, dapper sycamore
and bone smooth cottonwood

I heard mallards, snowy egrets
and my favorite, silverblack coots,
lounging in shallow water as if
they were toweled old men at a sauna

What surprised me was the angel-feathered body
guarded by a hunchbacked hawk
glaring back at me like a guilty vampire atop
his hapless victim, pecking at its beanpole neck

The bird of prey blasted into the trees, perching
on a branch, angrily observing my approach
Beside the shore of moss, mud and stone
lay supine a juvenile duck with a grotesquely

twisted head, its webbed feet pedaling
midair like an upturned bicycle
Its agonal, guppy breathing and distantly dim
flaxen eyes clutching my dutiful heart

It was barely alive, a dollop of blood upon its throat
Turkey vultures double and triple looped above me,
so many there must have been bigger game to ply
I sighed and stepped over the poor gasping creature

It was able to crane its crooked neck and regard me,
beak opening and closing in broken respiration,
akin to a hatchling beckoning wormy regurgitation
But I could only offer it reincarnation so I stomped

my foot down on its head as hard as I could
A crepitus of sound of sharp gravel cleaved the sky
the same moment the hawk burst out the foliage
and flew away, chasing the soul only it could see

Joe Amaral splits his time spelunking around the California central coast as a paramedic and stay-at-home dad to two saucy little girls.  His poetry and short stories have appeared in awesome places around the world.  Joe also won the 2014 Ingrid Reti Literary Award.

Great Blue Heron by Roy Beckemeyer

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dead snag along the
edge of the creek
unfolds like a parasol opening,
squawks  effort, pulls
gangly
legs
that
trail
like
reeds
behind him, white lime of feces
streak  onto water like an afterthought,
wide wings mask the road of sky
between the trees, a deep whoosh
so thick with flapping
you have to suck
at your breath,
cramp
your
diaphragm,
catch and swallow
that air before
it curls away
into the eddies
of his leaving.
—

Roy Beckemeyer’s poems have appeared in The Midwest Quarterly, The North Dakota Review, Coal City Review, and I-70 Review.  He was a 2016 Pushcart nominee, and his collection of poems, “Music I Once Could Dance To” (Coal City Review and Press, 2014), was selected as a 2015 Kansas Notable Book.

 

 

 

 

How does the rooster know when to crow by Rae Marie Taylor

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and the fly to start buzzing
right now
How do they and
all the birdsongs know to stop
and wait

while the sun
climbs up the other side of
Kitchen Mesa sending rose glints
into the sky
but not yet, not quite touching
the soft red earth
where I stand
two ravens know to swoon
past with a soft, throaty greeting
quickening trills and twitters
there in the gulch
below

the sun’s glowing
right now
the purest white
down the Dakota Sandstone
caressing
purple mudstone
where fossils still lie.
—
Rae Marie Taylor performs on Spoken Word stages in Quebec and the American Southwest. Author of the poetry CD Black Grace, Rae’s The Land: Our Gift and Wild Hope also won the 2014 Colorado Independent Publishers’ Merit Award and was Finalist in the 2013 New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards (environment).

Take the Apple by Michelle Holland

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Drag out books with dog-eared pages, find thatIMG_0924
quote to make some sense of Adam and Eve,
the doctrine of apple trees and the real
story of knowledge. Take the apple not
just to eat, but cast the seeds and make sure
to spread them wide along the paths. Seek out
that birdsong found on an ipod matching
the birdsong from the lush cottonwood down
by the ditch, to know a Bullock’s Oriole.
Notice the canary-yellow bottom
of a brilliant white sego lily
balanced on its slender stalk. Truth rises
in spits and starts, our own bird call, a trill
of thought where the hummingbirds whirr and dive.

—

Michelle Holland has two collections of poetry, “Event Horizon,” included in The Sound a Raven Makes, (Tres Chicas Press) \ New Mexico Book Award winner 2009, and Chaos Theory, (Sin Fronteras Press).  She is co-poetry editor of the Sin Fronteras Journal, and treasurer of the New Mexico Literary Arts Board.