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Three New Poems

Gooseneck Loosestrife, Parkinson's Sparrow, Watauga Augury

Published onDec 09, 2024
Three New Poems
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Gooseneck Loosestrife

Why the loosestrife
won't make it through winter
the botanist would know
and the gardener sleeved
in dirt, the hobbyist in love
with sap and passage,
the way spikes help
hold the sun's ichor
and roots reach
down as tendrils,
fingers. Somehow
beyond my understanding
leaves and petals forming
tiny starbells tell
stem and pistil
or even the sweetest
days of mild wind
and generous light
that night ice is
coming soon to
sheath and strangle
any fiber in reach.
Life will go skeletal
and be trampled.
And yes, today's
rising stems know
to cluster with others
so that the family,
colony, clan, whatever,
can bunch to share
sustenance, almost
a flock of sheep,
which earns this
flower a second name –
Shepherd's Crook – 
silent, a question
mark at peace,
the spires unlikely
rife with mites
or tiny beetles,
and without such
pests, loosestrife bows 
so courtly in wind
and conducts quiet life 
as if blessed
and thereby are seldom
called weeds by even
laymen like me.
Of Asian origin,
the deciduous ornamental
is indicted as
invasive, simply too much
life for the chosen
space, and dies under
the touch of the keen
blade or deadly
chemicals. Its name
in archaic Greek arose
from conviction
among Thracian royals
that boiled leaves
would pacify a maddened
bull. It's all amazing,
and the more lore
I root out and gather,
collect and ponder,
the more placid,
soothed, serene and
riddle-smitten
I myself become.
Oh, I know the solution's
in the root secrets, cells,
nutrients, rainwater's
ruse, the protector's touch.
Yet still, thankfully,
I do not begin to grasp
in my wondering
wandering how these
modest, durable,
deciduous and gentle
wild flowers flower 
and perish above ground, 
yet in darkness 
of heart and season
strifelessly breed. 
It is more miracle 
than I can sanely sing.


Parkinson's Sparrow 

I call this trembling
arrowing up my arm
"Parkinson's Sparrow"
after a bird that flew
into my window 
last winter, against her
own reflection, shattering
my reverie on the snow.
In my cupped palms
she was stillness and heat.
Shaking, I began to blow,
the only remedy I knew,
my breath across her brow
and breast a warm 
and soundless speech,
until the wet wings stirred, 
then fluttered in a fury 
there against my fingers. 
I opened up slowly
to see the rust-brown
feathers, precise beak,
an emphatic black eye.
Gone in a heartbeat, she
headed for the holly hedge
uttering her flight cry —
seet, seet, seet. She printed
on my skin a memory
akin to these tremors
keeping me from sleep,
making my hands
and tenor voice unsteady.
“Resigned now,” I tell
my friends and family,
but ever reeling on the edge
of dread and self-pity, until
I recall the bird’s secret
and see the tremors I know —
disease and its sorrows —
diminished beside a single
sparrow one cold day
revived and then set free.
Lord have mercy.
Lord have mercy on me.

Watauga Augury


The goldfinch I call
"Parrot" because he out-yellows
any canary, jonquil or 
exotic of the jungle,
is pecking millet 
like a metronome,
oblivious, it seems,
to the scurry and bicker
aswirl around him, 
a matter of territory,
"pecking order," we say,
and the season of need.
Then the jay I named Snitch
because he warns any bird —
thirsty or splashing the bath —
of the slinking cat (ginger,
a neighbor's) and will
squawk out, though as usual
it's Parrot who, counter
to my Audubon guide,
really has the grit and spirit
to rush and assail
the would-be intruder, while
a flickery male cardinal
in the privet thicket seeks
to smother his flame
and leave strife to others,
but before long the melee
reverts to peaceful feeding
and a birdsong morning
after this scrap and palaver
over a scatter 
of simple seeds, 
if in fact the heart is simple
and only a seed. 

R. T. Smith founded Cold Mountain Review, then edited Southern Humanities Review. In June of 2018 he retired from Washington and Lee as writer-in-residence and after 23 years of editing Shenandoah. His most recent book is Doves in Flight (stories), and a collection of poems, Summoning Shades, released in 2019. 
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