alive like that

Model for a poem: A late summer field full of weeds and wildflowers, visited by butterflies and birds.

winged creatures

At night all the books I haven’t read lift from their perches in the bookcases and fly up, pages flapping wildly, fly up the stairway to my bedroom, they fly about my head at night, they try to disturb my sleep with the shame of their flapping pages. Waking in the morning, often I find one, splayed open where it has fallen upon the bedcovers.

bright birds yet unseen

I hear a hitherto unknown species of bird has been found in the forests of Malaysia. Scanning my bookcases I feel certain there are bright and rare poems yet undiscovered behind those spines. But as wonderful as they are, only human encounter makes them existent.

stiff competition

It was a warm spring evening, the door was propped open behind the speaker at the poetry reading, and throughout her reading birds could be heard singing in the background.

stray birds

A couple of days ago I found a copy of Tagore’s Stray Birds in a bin at the grocery store. Cost: 25 cents.


(n.b.: this two-bits was written a few years ago, but I post it today to mark the 150th anniversary of the birth of Rabindranath Tagore.)

winter view

Winter View

If this were a rooftop
covered with snow,
these words
would be
bird tracks
instead
of a poem.

—William Michaelian, Winter Poems (Cosmopsis Books, 2007)