Poetics in the Season of Migration
After fog, the sun unhitches geese
from the gleaned-over stubble-ground
where they have huddled through the night.
They rise now, clumsy, angling up
to blue, above the planet’s shade,
the mist and morning slurred with calls.
How apologize for poetry?
For how it fails the flock’s long pull
against the heaviness of Earth,
against wind, the mortal shear
of entropy that scatters form?
Their one, blared note sums up a year,
but words falter and trip, waste breath,
lose the smell of dirt or rain,
the wings once more climbing sunlight.
Such a long work, waiting to hear
that hard, scraping honk as song….
No longer clumsy, the geese order
and wheel, squared-off and cutting south,
stars intuited along the way,
written tight into their wedge, and gone.
by James Owens
from Autumn Sky Poetry Number 21, July 2011
Photo by Christine Klocek-Lim
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