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Winter Birds

by Michael Ferris

I said how I admired the Winter birds,
their hardy fiber and their stoic song.
I knew they couldn’t eat my pretty words,
so I would give them seed the Winter long:
black sunflower seed, a favored food of all
the chickadee, the titmouse, and the finch.
And though the narrow wind bit like a saw,
my pampered birds would barely feel a pinch.

But birds fly straighter than our best intents;
and reason is a fractured pane — alas —
for seeing through to action’s consequence:
the birds kept dying on my window glass.
Our best laid plans may give us cause to brood,
no sooner hatched and fledged than they are rued.

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Michael Ferris’s first true love was J. S. Bach. He has since had reckless affairs with Blaise Pascal, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost. He studied nothing of commercial value in college. He splits his time between Manhattan, where he renders unto Caesar, and Kingston, NY, where he confabulates with the hedgehogs and hummingbirds. He is grateful to have fallen on receptive ears recently at The Lyric, The Shit Creek Review, and Light Quarterly.

See links to all sonnets by this author


Pat Jones
Published 29 March 2011