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Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem.-Edgar Allan Poe

Poetry is when emotion has found its thought and thought has found words--Robert Frost

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance--Carl Sandburg

I have nothing to say, I am saying it, and that is poetry--John Cage

You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you--Joseph Joubert

Poetry is what in a poem makes you laugh, cry, prickle, be silent, makes your toe nails twinkle, makes you want to do this or that or nothing, makes you know that you are alone in the unknown world, that your bliss and suffering is forever shared and forever all your own. ~Dylan Thomas

joybragi84
Jun 30, 20232 min read

A New Nature Poem

L'est we forget that my blog is really a blog about poetry and having a place to share my poems and the pictures that accompany them, I have composed a poem today that I would like to share with you. For those of you with excellent memories, I said a while back that I was done with "nature" poems, but--What would you know?--the first time that I am inspired to put the figurative and symbolic pen to paper this summer, I have an idea about the birds at my feeder, the feederbirds, my yardbirds.

The idea was actually fueled by an incident that happened a few days ago. I had purchased some "economy" birdseed at Walmart instead of the usual black oil sunflower seed, and I noticed that the finches had stopped coming to the feeder as had most of the other birds except for a cardinal or two. The next trip to a gettin' place, I got the usual sunflower seed, filled the little blue house feeder, and almost before I had gone back into the house, the birds had come in flocks. I did fill one of my extra feeders with the "econo" stuff and hung it by the sunflower-filled feeder. Ironically, my yardbirds will eat the "econo" stuff if it is next to the sunflower seeds. Freakin' ingrates!


Ummm...sooo, here is the poem, and a picture or two of some of my most regular yardbirds. Enjoy!



Ingrates


I’ve rethought my song birds

As beggars of seeds

Who only bear me

When I fill their needs.


When the feeder is empty,

I don’t hear their song.

Their silence implies that

I’ve done something wrong,


For a few seconds after,

I’ve refilled their plate,

They all come to see me.

I don’t have to wait.


The waxwings, the sparrows,

The cardinals, a finch,

All figure my feeder

Will do in a pinch,


Then, again, when it’s empty,

How far will they fly

To say to themselves,

“We’re not bound to this guy?”




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I find that I cannot exist without Poetry--without eternal poetry--half the day will not do--the whole of it--I began with a little, but habit has made me a Leviathan.-John Keats

We do not quite say that the new is more valuable because it fits in; but its fitting in is a test of its value.-T. S. Eliot

A man may praise and praise, but no one recollects but that which pleases.-George Gordon, Lord Byron

The great beauty of poetry is that it makes everything in every place interesting.-John Keats

Our faulty elder poets sacrificed the passion and passionate flow of poetry to the subtleties of intellect and to the stars of wit; the moderns to the glare and glitter of a perpetual, yet broken and heterogeneous imagery, or rather to an amphibious something, made up, half of image, and half of abstract meaning. The one sacrificed the heart to the head; the other both heart and head to point and drapery.-S. T. Coleridge

The purpose of rhythm, it has always seemed to me, is to prolong the moment of contemplation, the moment when we are both asleep and awake, which is the one moment of creation.-W. B. Yeats

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