Within my mind, these little birds
fly around, nesting and living.
When one of them decides it's their
time to go,
they come up to the window.
They sit upon the sill and
patiently wait to be noticed.
Once our gazes meet, they
begin their final song, asking me
to memorialize them, their lives
into words and lines.
When they've sung their final breath and
all is done, they fly away
for good and float on.

I lay and looked up today
and on the cerulean blue
a letter was written in different hands

Starlings told of the everyday
shuttling from A to B til teatime
while flits of blue *** and dunnock
hinted at local worry
maybe at the lackadaisical cat
whose frou-frou collar
ruins the hunt

In fancy script the swifts
wrote high and mighty
chasing the imperceptible,
so not so distant really

The paragraph break of the red kite
weighed in
and wings and fingers stopped
to marvel
at near perfect epistolary

To let our wildest thoughts take flight

On gentle feathered wings of night

To break the bonds of earth and find

We leave our human chains behind

To soar and dip and skim the oceans roar

Released from all we were before

To feel the light and taste the air

Is not a gift that we can share

Still shackled to the ground it seems

We must content ourselves with dreams

Leaving birds to own the sky

While we look up and long to fly

I broke a commandment
and sat in the garden mid-afternoon,
so technically on the clock

every other life around me
lived
had a purposed buzz
and flap-winged damns to give
while mine were elsewhere,
somewhere

not gone, I guess
just hidden in emails
and dumb-watching other people’s
screen creations
from the follow/subscribe sidelines

and the industry of beasts
leaves me in a shade-corner
shamed by a simplicity
that my chosen complications obfuscate
poorly

free as a bird I found myself out of the cage of love
a display of unrestrained delight
released from physical obstruction
only to realize freedom smelled like floral notes of sambac,
jasmine and tunisian orange blossom just like you

the sunset melting from
a light, lively blue to lovely lavender hues;
soft, romantic piano melodies and
sopranos harmonizing in the trees;
and quiet, happy mornings,
the sunlight tickling the leaves and then my window,
and then your eyelids, the outline of your profile,
softly rising and falling, dreaming
next to me.

if i had words for how i feel of these things;
the gentle waves of your voice like the ocean,
your arms washing over and enveloping me,
the happy crashing of your laughter with mine,
your lips like fragments of light on the water's surface;
i believe those words might be
i love you

Grackles
Pecking at the lawn.
Pulling out terrified worms

Grass
Still wet from spring
Showers. Bright emerald green

Green
Sunlight hitting the blades
Just right. Backyard lushness

Grief
Already grieving for the
End of summer. Why?

To the boy Elis
by Georg Trakl
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Elis, when the blackbird cries from the black forest,
it announces your downfall.
Your lips sip the rock-spring's blue coolness.

Your brow sweats blood
recalling ancient myths
and dark interpretations of birds' flight.

Yet you enter the night with soft footfalls;
the ripe purple grapes hang suspended
as you wave your arms more beautifully in the blueness.

A thornbush crackles;
where now are your moonlike eyes?
How long, oh Elis, have you been dead?

A monk dips waxed fingers
into your body's hyacinth;
Our silence is a black abyss

from which sometimes a docile animal emerges
slowly lowering its heavy lids.
A black dew drips from your temples:

the lost gold of vanished stars.

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE: I believe that in the second stanza the blood on Elis's forehead may be a reference to the apprehensive ****** sweat of Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane. If my interpretation is correct, Elis hears the blackbird's cries, anticipates the danger represented by a harbinger of death, but elects to continue rather than turn back. From what I have been able to gather, the color blue had a special significance for Georg Trakl: it symbolized longing and perhaps a longing for death. The colors blue, purple and black may represent a progression toward death in the poem. Keywords/Tags: Georg Trakl, translation, German, Elis, blackbird, black forest, birds, brow, blood, grapes, monk, body, dew, stars