Spring Offerings from the Poets of Verse-Virtual: The Birds Are Watching Us and Many Other Exceptional Visions

It's April, and some of are all about the great -- or even decently good -- outdoors. Flowers, greening lawns, birdsong at dawn (so they tell me) and in the last hour of the lengthening day. We even saw a deer in our city neighborhood last week. It took a good long look at us, and disappeared; undoubtedly the right decision. 

Poets, it turns out, are bird-watchers. Here's a piece with a different point of view on the observing the activity at the feeder. 

Marjorie Moorhead’s inventive and satisfying poem “At the Feeder” is (almost) all about the birds. The poem describes the gang at the feeder:

“Crescent-shaped Blue Back White-bellied

Long Beak, and Yellowneck Stripe-feathered

join me at the eating spot. Large Bark-peck-pecker

comes too, then flies his blackwhite feathers red-head

back to trunk..”

            But, if we’re paying attention (and I had to go back to the first lines) we notice something different about the perspective. The tip-off comes right at the start: “she has her black eyes out

again.” 

             She? With those long black eyes?... I think the birds are on to us.  

   

On a much different subject, Marilyn Taylor’s sonnet “Posthumous Instructions” is simply (and literally) awe-inspiring. The title clearly announces the poem’s theme To choose one stanza:

“Let me liberate the elements

that fused in me the morning I was formed

and offer them again, as evidence

that my short visit left this place unharmed.”

…But we need to read them all

We're back to birds In Mark Alan di Martino’s “To a Warbler,” but here the speaker has discovered the need to explain the unseasonably early appearance of a (once) migratory bird to his daughter. In its  inventive word music, the poem sings like, perhaps, the bird: 

“Math-eaten, climate-singed, the change

came quick. In the still small span of a few lifted lifelines—

dour warnings bedamned—our tempest tossed, its leafless trust

trussed to the wings of a hymnal, taxidermied, back-taxed

to the be-yonder.”

Our migratory birds are all canaries in the coal mine. Global warming is changing our world. 

 

I enjoyed all three excellent poems by David Graham. “Sea Turtle,” to choose one, is an unsentimental look at the lifestyle of an ancient life-form that persists by persisting, its challenges and responses rendered in aptly hard-bitten imagery:

“Your young will crawl toward the light

they think is moonlit sea—

pavement glittering with headlights.

A jeep will eat the eggs

ghost crabs cannot find. You'll butt

your nose raw on aquarium walls,

snap dangled fingers like snailshells.”

 

Alan Walowitz’s clever and eloquent poem “The nth degree,” thoughtfully provided an explanation of its title. While the poem’s first qualifying phrase – “in the meager math I learned” –captures my own background in this subject, the poem convinces me it knows what it's doing with this insight:

“I know from a close look

at those strange Celtic languages,

unless you have a vowel

it’s sometimes hard to tell the difference

between nth and nthng—“

and leaves me with a new appreciation for our own flexible, malleable alphabet: Let’s hear it for vowels!

 

And while we’re being philosophical, Robert Wexelblatt’s brilliant thought experiment “Six Mental Exercises” takes readers to faraway places that prove to be broadening, maybe even mind-refreshing, staycations. For example: “Pretend you are an ancient Chinese poet in ancient China.”

And “Pretend you are an ancient Chinese poet when and where you are living now…”

These are mind stretchers. As the poem suggests, in the first of these two, “the transfiguration of the smallest cloud [becomes]

more telling than a change of emperors…”

You can read these poems in their entirety, and fine works by many other poets in Verse-Virtual's April 2021 issue. Here's the link    Verse-Virtual