Here is the first poem in a collection of twenty children’s poems about birds that I began over ten years ago.
The inspiration for this collection came out of the time I spent birdwatching with my grandchild Pearl. During our visits we often took Pearl to the beach or other natural areas in Florida to look for and observe birds. For a young person who, when we started these outings, was just learning to talk, Pearl showed unusual interest and acumen in spotting and watching birds and liked looking at my bird identification handbooks, especially on outings to the national seashore. I think the above picture illustrates this quite well.
This is the first poem of the twenty. Each poem features a different bird. I’ll send them out one at a time interspersed with my other writing via Compendium: The Kitchen Sink. A few of the accompanying photographs will be borrowed from internet files and are not my own (like this one of the bluebird)
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The Song about the Bluebird Goes
“Mr. Bluebird’s on my shoulder, it’s the truth, it’s natural”
but this little flash of sky is shy
and easily banished from yards and fields
around houses and farms by bigger louder birds.
Starlings, for instance, spread westward
and chased the bluebird out of their range
until, when I was small but a bit older than you are now,
we were encouraged by those who love birds
to nail little nest boxes to fenceposts
to lure the bluebirds back into our world
or they would surely vanish, take away
that quick single starfall of blue over sunny wheat
with the recognizable rise of their bright song
unless we could pin a kind of hope to them
in the stretches of grey that come with Spring here
in the north where snow never seems to vanish
except when we fall back into the stories in our sleep
stories that tame these small winged signposts
in our dream world of swelling fields.
Have you ever dreamt of a bright blue bird?
Has it come to perch on your shoulder
and sing?
You are among those small angels then, and we
could not imagine life without your song inside our sleep.
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