As Seen

This poem is in syllabics with a count of 8 syllables per line. The stanzas rhyme in pairs, ABCD, except the final stanza which has a single rhyme.

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That robin on the topmost point
Of the luscious spreading maple,
Stark upright in the June-blue sky
With his warrior’s red-blaze breast,

Lazily mutters a disjoint

Song having discharged his staple
Task of feeding the shrilled “I, I”
Of his young; stood down, he can rest.

Lower, crazy-active starlings

Tug cherries from the cherry tree;
Its serried leaves like drooping tongues
Pant in the swelling morning heat.

Frantically clinging to gnarlings

Of string-thin branches those birds glee
In fruit, hanging like drunks on rungs,
Wings clattering like rain in wheat.

Lower again, chink-voiced tom tits

Crowd into fresh forsythia
Like scraps on the wind; voracious
For greenfly they trapeze into

Every angle, living on wits,

Heads blue as the banked aubrietia
Below. Abrupt as loquacious
Panhandlers they flee on the hue.

What a chirograph of being:

Above, the sparrow hawk seeing,
Below, the dowdy wren fleeing;
All sustained by light agreeing.

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© June 2014