Showing posts with label Listen Up. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Listen Up. Show all posts

Thursday, February 6, 2025

Yabba Dabba Doo

 

Photo © Jennifer Wagner

Yabber-yabber, do

bird,

it’s no ordinary thing

to hang a song in a tree,

to make a valentine of music,

sweet songbird,

on the vine.

 

Here I am

all blush and flush and flutter,

raptured full and giddy,

on your golden, wild wine.

 

 

© 2025 Jennifer Wagner

 

 

Again for Shay's word garden word list (still open for linking):  flutter, giddy, golden, wild, yabber-yabber, and for Dora's dverse poetics reimagining (closed/too late for linking).

 

Photo:  French horn hanging from a tree at the DeGrazia Gallery in the Sun.


Saturday, September 6, 2014

magnitude of creation (1)


Photo © 2014 Jennifer Wagner



the chickadees
and nuthatches

clap their wings
against their sides

zip, dip
snip
seeds
from the feeder

look
and dip,
snip again

twist
fly       a          w         a          y

and a moment later
are
back again
all day long

inch
by inch 
we get closer, to the window

watch them
watch us
watch them

face to beak

and learn
in some small way

how each
small thing

is never
small



© 2014 Jennifer Wagner



This summer I visited the Poetry Foundation in Chicago.  On display were some of Tony Fitzpatrick’s drawings The Secret Birds.  He says his grandmother used to say, “For the price of a piece of bread you can hear God sing.



Sunday, March 23, 2014

Varied Thrush



At the beginning,
ends,
and afters,

(the dawn,
the dusk,
the eclipsing of the rain shower),

you call:

1. wake up

2. calmly be

3. rejoice


I think you’re right.



© 2014 Jennifer Wagner


We hear the Varied Thrush from our house every day.  I haven’t gotten a photo (they are quick to hide), but they are pretty orange and bluish-gray birds with a call much like a referee’s whistle.

For the open link at Poets United Poetry Pantry

Thursday, July 18, 2013

Nightjar


You can hear them,
like little ghosts
haunting the air at night,
though we don’t have
the blue note whippoorwill
in our evergreens.

If you’ve ever hummed a dry, lonesome aria
from your own warbling wind struck throat
you can hear them—
in the hollowed out whisper-choke,
strummed endless in black on wet pillowed nights,
haunted and hidden.

Yes, you can hear them, even here,
always, when you’ve known lonely,
so ink-dark and bled deep to bone.

Or maybe they can hear you.


© 2013 Jennifer Wagner



At dVerse host Tony Maude has invited us to write to any FFA or MTB prompt they’ve offered in the past.  I chose Victoria Slotto's Literary Allusion.  One of my all time favorite short stories is The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving.  I also love the haunting song Midnight in Montgomery by Alan Jackson.  Each work references the beautifully eerie call of the nightjar bird, the Eastern Whip-poor-will.  I have alluded to each work in my piece.  Happy year 3 dVerse! 

Wednesday, July 10, 2013

Thief


Steller's Jay


plumage
in silver blue,
sooty crest of charcoal
worn like a thief’s mask, and it’s true,
she will
rob the songbirds’ freshly twigged nests
of eggs and chicks when seeds
and ash berries
run low


© 2013 Jennifer Wagner


A butterfly cinquain for Poetry Jam:  A Bird’s Eye View.  I don’t have my own photo of a Steller’s Jay but we see them often around here.  They are beautiful, loud and predatory.  For more about the Steller’s Jay go here.