Snowy Owl by Lisa Pellegrini

Amber pools buried in white plumage,

slits of fire whose warmth

escapes the world's notice,

blink with the grace of a

butterfly in flight.

Talons curled over scaly branches

prepare for their daily dream.

Invisible dancers skip across feathers,

creating miniature fans like

the fins of tropical fish.

He rotates his head toward the blue.

The branch shakes as he departs.

He is a floating sheet of paper,

adrift on a hammock of air,

weightless in a world that

gasps in wonderment one minute

and forgets the next.

 Lisa Pellegrini, USA

A Frame of Snowflakes by A J Huffman

falls in perfect form

                                 ation.  10

for difficulty (this is not their usual

locale).  We watch in wonder as

the weaklings waiver, gather,

cluster across the sand.  Stoically,

they stay

white for only the breath

of a moment before the rising

wind and warming temperatures

return them, in original form, to the waves.

A J Huffman, Florida, USA

Midnight Robin by Maureen Weldon

While the sky shimmers like shot silk,
chimneypots a toothy smile,
I count the pots, 1 2 3 4 5.

On my kitchen table, sheets and sheets

of screwed up poems,
 I will flatten them tomorrow
for shopping lists.

While perfumed smells of hyacinths

bring memories of my mother:
‘they make lovely Christmas presents’
she would say, as she potted and tended …

The evening moves along

as evenings do…
 The moon a half golden bracelet.
The sky cluttered with stars.

All is still, no cars, no trains.

And in this stillness,
the midnight robin sings.

Maureen Weldon, North Wales, UK

Nesting by Paul de Vito

The light filtered lightly through

the window, she was sitting on the sill

waiting for the wind to stop blowing,

it was spring and she was building

her nest in the tree next to my house,

the wind gusted and the window

blew open, in she flew suddenly,

around and around the room,

looking for a place to settle,

finally she spotted my pipe

by my reading chair and swooped

down to dig some tobacco

from the bowl, then up again,

around in flight and out the window

again to her nest in the tree.

Paul de Vito, New York, USA 

editor's note: this poem really caught my eye as I had just recently read about birds using cigarette butts in their nests, you can read more about it here.

untitled by Arthur Durkee

raven floats in morning wind
above a sea of grass

howling wind outside my door
begging to get in
long night terrors, fury's call
gone in morning light
linger still behind rough clouds
moving fast and tight

raven silent in the sky
all sound drowned in wind

picture mountains gray and dun
bare tree on the ridge
piebald sun and shadow cloud
red side-wall canyons iced
picture groaning pines bent down
giving birth to wind



Arthur Durkee, USA

Gone for Winter by Cynthia Sidrane

Walking by the waterless
Flood control tunnel
This early evening in fall
There's no evidence of the
Mexican free-tailed bats
And their nightly mass-exit
Out the gaping concrete mouth
Into the traffic of insects
And the beetled hours
Except a vast emptiness
Heaving from their summer roost
Exhaling dank guano
Into the stillness of desert twilight.


Cynthia Sidrane, Arizona, USA

Solar by Chris Crittenden

a rut of light
locks horns with pines

to loose
mercurial rills of gold,

gold licked and snatched
by manic leaves,

dribbling down
to vulgar shanties of decay.

even the swarth
of the filth that is death

luxuriates and swells,
guzzling the gift

sown from an infernal perch,
ramrodded

through unthinkable cold,
gold

that gilds sapphire,
impregnates green and crystals,

gold to stir
incarnadine cores.


Chris Crittenden, Maine, USA

Dawnsingers by Richard Krepski

Predawn May morn (waking beside you),
I was drawn by an ecstasy of birdsong
To gaze at the glow on the Eastern horizon
And learn the cause of the planet's turning.
It is not gears meshed with Ptolemy's spheres,
Nor Newton's choreography of gravity;
It is the call of birds--
A forcefield of sound at the edge of dawn
Circles the globe like a wave
Engages the sun and torques the earth along.

Then we were part of the song,
But now sounds November's bleak noise.
Lovers and dawnsingers disappear,
Withdraw their crescendoing joys.
The darkness palls, the cold stars stall,
This utter night could stay,
Unless we the remnant all gather and call
To mate our meridian with a new day.


Richard Krepski,  PA, USA

Haiku by Jeffrey Winke

rustle of autumn

permeates

the campfire air

Jeffrey Winke, WI, USA

Outsider by Ian C Smith

Our cat wants to join us where the fire draws.

Hind legs stretched on the step in frosty air

he reaches the doorknob with his fore paws.

But for want of thumbs he’d be in my chair.

Trying to turn the brass he’s as bold as

he cries plaintively (from our point of view)

which we ignore, admiring his pizzazz

from the swelled head of evolution’s queue.

He hones unsheathed claws on carpeted stairs

and although we concede animal rights

springing on bench tops and moulting mog hairs

means he’s shut out even on freezing nights.

If we were small like cats, with him our size

one dark winter evening we’d be his prize.


Ian C Smith, Australia

秋老虎 (A Tiger in Autumn) by Joseph Harker

This holy electricity was in the air today, rummaged between
the cars flashing down Sixth Avenue and the long fingers of buildings
jutting up from the earth. Even in the city’s encrusted heart,
autumn is the kaleidoscope season. The whole world rolled over,

held up to the sun to let all its pieces jangle and clatter
in riots of color: never a sky that deserved the adjective blue,
market stalls lined with apples and pumpkins like some
secret painter set off a vegetable grenade. Everything deciding

to throw one last party. No paleness to it like with the afterbirth
of spring, no drowning haze like the maturity of summer.
Now is when we feel the tumbling of days, see the sun move
ever more frantically up the staircase heavens, feel ourselves

tumbling round our wheel of fortune. The year knows its time is
almost up. At the start the peeking of green and purple is a relief,
but here (in the empty spaces, in the parks and medians and
rooftop verandas) the whole bodies of trees, stones, air,

they allow themselves to burn out with glory. Leaves that turn
have already begun to die: and before they crumble, they
celebrate, stand our hair on end with their beauty, coming down
on our heads, we, who learn so much, who learn so little.

Joseph Harker, USA

Tanagers by Zachary Fishel

They call them scarlet but from the
sounds of their voice
it’s fire,
burning leaves crackling in
the fresh buds.
The glowing orange of morning light
as you pull covers up with the sunrise,
after coffee it’s fine though.
That’s how they sing.

The birds,
now hard to find anywhere
still flit around up here
in the mountains of oak trees.
They make you glimpse,
often,
to see if the tree’s are ablaze
or if nature has combusted like man
has
on itself time and again.
Fall approaches already even as the new buds shoot
out
looking like traffic lights with the tanagers
calling for love,
to last a season and go away.
On itself time and again.


Zachary Fishel

Wild Geese by Andrew Pei

They look toward the skyline ahead of them;
They hover over big places and small.
They keep mountains and rivers under feet;
They brush cheeks with the floating clouds.
They pay no attention to the envious eyes watching from below;
They pay no attention to the admiration soaring up to the sky.
Flying toward their destination is the only focus,
A destination they have reached year after year.
Leaving the familiar behind is painless for them,
Into the opening arms of the sky they go as the season calls.
When they return in accordance with the schedule,
They will find the same nests they built before.
Come and go makes a simple cycle.
That’s their life; they carry on with it.

Andrew Pei 

Some Errant Clouds by Ken Wheatcroft-Pardue

Some errant clouds scud along the sky,

While their shadows glide along the topography

over hills, malls, rivers, ghettos, burbs.

My blinking eyes, catch this scene.

But between my ears, I wonder . . .

why is this so special?

Same damn clouds as 10, 20, 30, or a millennium ago.

White cumulus with just a streak of blue

racing, patches of azure between them.

So why am I staring, my feet stuck, my neck craning

up at this moveable, ever malleable sky?

 Ken Wheatcroft-Pardu, Texas, USA

The Cave of Shanidar by Gary Every

What else really matters

            except that someone loved him

            and loved him dearly

            enough to place flowers in his grave.

            The archeologist excavates;

            carefully scraping the remains

            of a 60,000-year-old Neanderthal

            into a sack

            to be weighed and analyzed.

            So much of prehistory has been lost;

            social structure, tribal government,

            and even though the shape of their skulls,

            length of their tongues

            and complexity of their relationships

            screams for a language

            not a single word has been retained.

            The archeologist tries to piece together the past,

            amazed that this tiny grave

            could hold so much flower pollen.

            There are many more flowers

            than could have blown into the cave of Shanidar

            with the wind;

            even during the most violent storms.

            The grains of pollen are all that remains

            of hollyhock, grape hyacinth, bachelor buttons, and groundsel-

            beautiful blossoms which faded into dust.

            All we can say for certain

            about this dead troglodyte,

            60,000 years after the fact,

            is that this short, squat, thick-skulled brute

            whose life was ruled by blade, blood, and butchering,

            was that someone loved him

            and loved him dearly

            enough to place beautiful flowers in his grave.

Gary Every, Arizona, USA

Ynys Môn by L C Ricardo

Ynys Môn 

On craggy, stone-strewn shores
glacial breakers
shatter

the mothering rock.
Her deep ores sustain her
children.

She views hoary mountains
and stretches through
pale, lucent mist,

a ship off the cairn
or ancestral ghost,
sea-kept.

Her name rings silver.
Her heart, living coal,
men's bread.

Her elder offspring raised stones
like broken circlets,
scattered,

left in mute patterns,
undecipeherable and
sacred.


L C Ricardo, Florida, USA

The Material Soul by James Valvis

My daughter wants to know about the cat.
Will it go to heaven when it dies?

My wife is content to tell her that it will, but I know it won’t.
That cat, according to the faith we practice, has a material soul.

Our heaven is a heaven for humans: not cats, cows, or cabbages.
How could we even begin to move, to live in any way,
if every bacteria we killed was equally made in God’s image?

But I don’t pretend to understand it all myself.
Heaven has always seemed to me less likely than hell.

It’s certainly harder to imagine what it is like to be there
and what might deliver you there in the first place.

In many ways, the cat is more deserving of heaven than I am.

The cat has never yelled at my wife over nothing,
never flew off the handle at my daughter for her trichotillomania.

It’s not easy to conceive of a place that invites none of the things we love.
It’s even harder to imagine a heaven where a beloved daughter misses her cat.


James Valvis, Washington, USA

Mother Psalm 8 by Rachel Barenblat

When all else fails, a stroll will put you to sleep.
We walk beneath trees still mostly green, here
and there a branch burst into purple flame, until
Whole Foods looms glossy at the sidewalk's end.
We load into the basket beneath your sleeping form
a pumpkin and a gourd hooked like a swan's neck.
All the way there my sister and I talk about marriage
and I wonder with whom you'll walk like this someday
remembering aloud the house you grew up in, our
spiral staircases, the boxes of dolls in the basement.
The minute we stop, you wake; I pepper your head
with kisses, try to adjust your already-drooping socks.
It's autumn in Newton. My muddy iced coffee is the last
of the season. Little man, you can move yourself now
across the floor with intent, though you pause and sit
contemplating whether the ball that's rolled away
is worth the effort of the journey. It's always worth
the effort of the journey: the ball, the book, the child
you may someday try to raise, as clueless as we.
Make your way across the room. Pluck sweetness
from every interaction, extract smiles from strangers.
Go get it: we're cheering each painstaking step you take.


Rachel Barenblat, MA, USA

Selkie by Lori Lamothe

“The most common theme in selkie folklore, however, is one in which a cunning young man acquires, either by trickery or theft, a selkie-girl’s sealskin.”

For years, you wore ordinary as a housecoat.

Typed memos by day and made weak

martinis by night. For years, you were the one

they could count on to sweep all the unsaid things

under the rug. Sometimes you’re oblivious to blue.

Sometimes a shadow caught in a pool of light

makes you want to scratch off your skin,

dissolve in tides of wind that swing out and across

the street’s moonlit lawns.  Now, with your life

half gone, your child of amber eyes and ruby shoes

hands you what was nailed to the bottom

of a long-lost trunk. For six nights

you sleep on shore, cocooned in love’s sheer

blanket. On the seventh you slip an arm

into fur that still glows like coals, feel

how this shell of warmth still holds

an echo of water’s deep lullaby.

As you dive into a tango of stars, you turn

and watch her hand moving in adagio,

perfectly timed to the story you always told.

Lori Lamothe

A Small Thing by Kathleen Brewin Lewis

In second grade

my daughter fell in love

with origami,

her fingers becoming

more and more adept

as she folded and pressed

the brilliant paper

into whales, frogs, cranes

the size of her fist,

then began to make the cranes

smaller and smaller

until she had created a bird

as tiny as her fingertip.

It seemed impossible to--

would be impossible for--me,

but she rose

and walked with great grace

to come and place

her delicate masterpiece

in my hand. 



Kathleen Brewin Lewis, Atlanta, USA

Physics by Angelica Joy Romans

She pressed flowers,

Calla Lilies, Scarlet Pimpernel, Bindweed

In her physics book, page one hundred

  and thirty-four

where forces defined motion

"Weightlessness is not zero"

she skipped that sentence,

of reason and explanation

and settled for the crumbled

mummers of Biology

snug in the corners

of her physics book

Angelica Joy Romans

Werrikimbee by Joe Massingham

The brown earth snake winds up the hill.

We travel on it, ants in space

held in by tree upon tree upon tree,

one dropped by bat or bird to mark

each year since the start of counting

four hundred million years ago;

and ferns for festivals and feasts

in case the months go unremembered.

Somewhere in a green curve

the firework bursts of two hydrangeas

dazzle the eye, pull in the breath, attract

butterflies, their very familiarity

reminding us we both are strangers.

Author’s note:  Werrikimbee is one of a number of rainforest National Parks on the north-east New South Wales coastal escarpment.


Joe Massingham, Australia

Stopwatch by Jason Sturner

Everyone is dead.

Slumped against steering wheels,

on the floors of kitchens and bedrooms,

face down in swimming pools.

Bodies litter the malls,

the halls of prestigious universities,

they're in hospitals and sports bars,

at desks in corporate offices.

In the center of the oval office

lays the body of our president,

maggots crawl out

from beneath her eyelids.

The rats beneath the streets

lift their heads and twitch their noses.

Vultures fly off trees

into waves of decay.

Remnants of humanity crumble,

are buried, eroded and grown over.

We are dust and fossils; we are history.

The planet is lush and productive.

Out in an unnamed ocean

a new breed of dolphin is born,

its flippers more like modified claws.

One day, it will use them to grasp the shoreline.

Jason Sturner, Illinois, USA

This poem was  first published in Down in the Dirt Magazine, June 2009

Less is More by Geralyn Pinto

Less is more, of course                                                                       

That’s why we’ve shown them how 

Bright, bounded bamboo thickets

Are better than sprawling, untidy rain forests.

The zoo workers have even crafted a salt lick

Painstakingly patting sodium chloride

Onto the side of a gash in the earth

Which has municipal water flowing through it

And pretends to be a forest stream.

(The real river that loitered around

Splendid, aimless and occasionally wild

Was long ago domesticated to factory use

So that a distant CEO with greasy charm

Could declare dividends to a grateful public).

Rock surfaces were carefully constructed,

Neat little dens built for delicate young cubs

And a deep ravine dug all around. Just so.

The only thing they did, which you probably

Never saw in raw tiger country,

Was to erect a bright red board

Warning Homo sapien visitors to the park

That this was the lair of Panthera tigris,

Ruthless, lone hunter with a predilection, (sometimes)

For human blood.

Whoever did it hadn’t reckoned that two legs

Are better than four;

Two hands cleverer, faster than paws

Furnished with pads and claws;

One well-organized brain superior to

Brute muscle, olfactory sense and night vision.

So there’s no real need to worry

Because in ourselves we’ve proved, haven’t we,

Beyond a niggle of doubt that

Less is more?

Geralyn Pinto, India

Seals by Byron Beynon

This morning you telephoned
that two seals were swimming
in the Tawe,
they brought with them
innumerable seagrams,
navigable rhapsodies
gleaming with motion,
a lustre of sea-eyes
that floated in fields
where tides registered
global warmth, changeable seasons;
for a moment
they held your breath,
sensed their need to escape
at one with their tidings
delivered across the miracle of unchained waters.


Byron Beynon, Wales, UK

On Things Lost by Nadya Avila Chant

I must not dip my fingers
In the ashes of my sacrifice.
I must not gaze at summer skies
In search of balloons I let go
Long ago
Or beg the wind to return my whispers
As it often does my screams.

No.

And neither must you linger at this dusty altar,
Singing dirges to your lamb,
For I am only borrowed carbon:
I too, am a gift to be returned.

Nadya Avila Chant, USA

Desert Walk by David Chorlton

Our presence leaves no footprints

on desert slopes

built on long spells

without rain,

where we turn over stones,

snag on a waist-high

branch that snaps,

or tread down a clump of grass

as we maneuver to a place

with a better view

of the green-tailed towhee

that flew from a mesquite

and dipped out of sight.

For a person to disappear here

on a bright day like this

would be the natural thing,

leaving nothing but a scent

after passing through

his own mirror without

causing so much as a crack.

David Chorlton, USA

The Female by Lori Lipsky

Demure she sits

light on the branch

poised with confidence

Drab in olive dress she rests

with orange beak

with miniature crest

Demure she perches

waits for him

to approach in brilliant red


Lori Lipsky, Wisconsin, USA

On the Origin of Black Birds by Khara House

It takes hundreds of millions of years to find her

but the dark ones discover their Eve in the fossilized

shallows of a lagoon. They call her Rosetta Stone, Mother

Bird, trace their talons through the delicate impression

of feathers in the limestone, her fine-grained imprint

of bone. Witness her forearms, her fingers, her gentle

curving claws, come as close to a caress as a lover.

She is excavated, brushed clean with warm black

feathers, chipped out bill by bill bit by bit until

her form is fresh, withdrawn from the earth, untombed,

flown to the free birds of the world. It is decided

that she belongs to all. The work begins,

dividing her bones, the hollow stamps of her plumes

pecked into relics, sold for seeds to the cardinals

who tuck them away in reliquaries, avail them

as blessings on the laybirds.

In time the relics fade, the bones decay. All

that is left of the avian eve is her memory, her myth.

An ancient soul that once had a tail, shed to touch

the night sky, spread her wings so deep into the night

that the inky ether wrapped her in its sheen,

set her glory in the morning, rival to the sun,

calls her clandestine, carbon, kohl, lastly crow, after lover.

Khara House, Pennsylvania, USA

Badak api* by Linda Hofke

Lost

in the deep forest,
surrounded by raging fires
an old Malaysian woman drops to

her knees, thrusts her hands outstretched to the
crescent moon and pleads, badak api! badak api!“
but the flames continue to flicker and spread,
dance among the trees, twirling around her.

In the morning, this spot of forest

is reduced to tiny embers and the only trace of her

lies in warmed bones and powdery ash like the

ground-up horn of rhinoceros used by the medicine man

to combat fever and convulsion.
No mythical creature could have saved her

from the inferno. No mighty Sumatran rhinos dared to

answer her call for they must remain hidden

from the poachers who seek to rid them

of their pointy defenses; they have

no time to stamp out evening fires, even if one

desperate soul must succumb to extinction

a bit sooner than they.

*Though there has never been any evidence, there are legends about rhinoceros stamping out fire in Malaysia. This creature is called badak api in Malay. Badak means rhinoceros and api means fire.

Linda Hofke, Germany

Red Squirrel by Chris Crittenden

sputter and chip,
rebuke me with variants
of raucous croon,

you perky piccolo of fuss,
high on a spruce,
helming azure.

if i could shimmy, bristle,
and cackle like you,
besotted by the spirit of

Puck,

would i, too, dash
from my own moods,
a child lost to daredevilry--

and forget the madness
of the mean world
through the quicksilver roan

of my flips?


Chris Crittenden, Maine, USA

American Goldfinch by Sean Ulman

flapping up flung carve (yellow yo-yo, coal dotted forehead) undulating mathematically culled wave =
lifts and dips on dotted line patrolling overgrown hedgerow hedged w/ crawling nestlings
piping potato chip dip potato chip dip in flight
perched, fluting indigo-bunting-like multi-syllable chimes drain-drowned in impalpable air caverns

Sean Ulman, USA

Moth Stream by Gary Every

The moon shines through my window at midnight
as I toss and turn, unable to sleep
but I am capable of dreaming plenty.
It is not the moon which keeps me awake
nor even the wind
which rattles the leaves in the trees
and shakes my window frame.
It is knowledge which gives me insomnia.
I have recently learned something startling.
Moths, tiny soft fuzzy winged insects,
can somehow sense the direction of the wind
and as the seasons change
so that the moths feel the need to migrate,
all the moths at once,
elevate a mile or two into the sky
where the breeze tosses the tiny airborne creatures
in the direction they wish to go,
hurling them swiftly,
as fast as sixty miles an hour.
How extraordinary it must be
to be so tiny and be flung so fast
and so far.
Do the moths have any grasp
of the massive geography they cover so quickly?
Outside my window nighttime flowers bloom,
trumpeting datura and white yuccas flickering atop their stalks
like candle flames,
beckoning for the moths to drop from the sky.
I lie awake at night unable to sleep
trying to imagine millions of moths
two miles above my bed
soaring through the air at sixty miles an hour,
cursed with insomnia
caught up in a streaming dream of moths.

Gary Every, Arizona, USA

Well Sprung by Jim Howe

I don’t remember

how old I was,

seven or eight,

when I first felt the urge

to capture

an enchanted being.

I caught him

in the gentle grasses

of our side yard.

Cupped in my right hand

he waited –

his antennae receiving signals

from distant worlds,

his cold eyes

measuring the texture of my skin,

his armor sparkling

in the shadows of my fingers,

his legs akimbo.

An emerging spirit

opened my prison.

I held out my hand

as straight as a diving board.

The grasshopper sprang

with power and grace:

a green arc

of parabolic escape.

It never knew

what it left behind:

a bonfire in my chest,

a salty koan,

a certain point

I couldn’t hold onto.

Jim Howe, IL, USA

Bumble by De Jackson

My son says the honeybees are dying. 
Some of those fat fuzzy fancy-free meandering ones, too. 

They’re getting sick, he says, voice thick with sadness.
I am not entirely up on these things. I assume
we have once again dusted our crops with poison or
overfilled one too many dumps or finally hair sprayed
our world into submission. Maybe they took one look
at our selfish hearts and their own simply stopped
beating. My boy is 9, loves all living things. I want to
tell him it will all be okay, that there are swarms
of scientists whose entire job it is to figure this out,
that he can be one of them someday if he wants
to, that surely someone, someday will find the cure
for our acute case of narcissism. I do tell him these
things, even as I wonder when the ‘birds and bees’
talk came to include such words as endangered and
extinct. And even as I taste the words on my own
tired tongue,
                   I hope to God I’m not lying. 

De Jackson, Nevada, USA

Mutualism by M P Jones IV

what do the honeybees
and the hummingbirds
think they are doing
as they dip and drop,
weaving the wind
in the red fringed
feathery fields of lace

in what language
does the fungal earth
thank its leafy grasses?

we are all
islands of misanthropy,
insular universes,
pillars of solitude,

but why, then,
do mitochondria flourish
in the sovereign nations
of our flesh,

and why do I yearn
in the stillest hours
for your breath on my skin?


M P Jones IV

Tanager by Thomas O'Dore

descending a forested ridge
where the valley slopes away
I look down upon one canopy
and up into another

from the lower swift and silent
a black fetched crimson arrow
pierce disappears into green wall
startle shot from a bur oak top
my intrusion \ launching flight
of the last scarlet tanager I have seen

where he went
where they’ve gone
six billion people
one scarlet tanager

The Days Dissolve by Luis Cuauhtemoc Berriozabal

It kills me to lay here
as the days dissolve
and are tucked away.

I look at the stars
because they are nothing
like me. They are
bright and mystical.

I am more like the birds
flying off on tangents.


 Luis Cuauhtemoc Berriozabal, CA, USA

haiku by Jeffrey Winke

café window view