The Bluebird Word

An Online Literary Journal for Poetry and Flash

Tag: seasonal shifts

Photo by Vijayalakshmi Nidugondi on Unsplash

Her September Familiar

1 April 2024 /

Poetry by Sharon Whitehill

Now is the season when hummingbirds vanish,
daylight dwindles, and the leaves fall,

a strange season of endings and losses,
colors fading to gray with a blackness behind.

A particular sorrow for her, this heartache,
even if shared by many, akin to the sky grief we feel

at losing the stars, even the brightest invisible now
everywhere but the most rural night skies.

Though more personal, too: a growing awareness
of how fragile her loved ones, family and friends,

this lingering grief for those absent, now or forever,
her people. As precious and ever-present as the invisible stars,

essential to her as signal fires in a storm,
yet everything seems, everything is, so precarious.

Each year it comes, this melancholy, her familiar,
not with the surprise of a window thrown suddenly open

to weather but as her September companion.
Until one day, down the road, it departs to the rattling call

of sandhill cranes overhead, a flurry of cedar waxwings,
and a pair of fawns still dressed in their white polka dots.

Sharon Whitehill is a retired English professor now living in Port Charlotte, Florida. In addition to poems published in various literary magazines, her publications include two scholarly biographies, two memoirs, two poetry chapbooks, and a full collection of poems. Her chapbook, THIS SAD AND TENDER TIME, is due winter 2024.

Photo by Simon Wilkes on Unsplash

Early Spring

1 March 2024 /

Poetry by Sharon Scholl

When everything portends,
clings to the edge of not quite yet,
teeters on perhaps.

Just a hint of green
pokes from wilted stalks,
risking little, wary of reversal.

Nothing signals go ahead!
Nothing gestures all safe now
to a land still hovering.

I sit with my seed catalog
deep in petunia fantasies
despite its warning, sow after frost.

Sharon Scholl is an ancient poet (91) still very active as convener of a poetry critique group and poetry editor of a local women’s journal. Her poems currently published are in Front Range Review and Third Wednesday.

silhouette photography of trees near water
Photo by Blaque X on Pexels.com

Fall Sun

12 August 2023 /

Poetry by Sharon Scholl

rises reluctantly through ground mist,
travels on the fringe of the horizon,
sinks into a cloak of early dusk.

I find the last of it in a tiny pool
and savor its remains reduced
from August lake to dim reflection.

Leaves enough remain to catch its light
and send their shadows dancing
with a scatter of dry weeds.

Lingering squashes dangle on shrinking
vines while single pumpkins sit deserted
in a field of empty furrows.

This is the season of farewells
to spring wonders worn and drab,
to the past that fades in memory.

Sharon Scholl is a retired college professor (humanities) who convenes a poetry critique group and maintains a website (freeprintmusic.com) that donates music to small, liberal churches. Her poetry chapbooks, Seasons, Remains, Evensong, are available via Amazon Books. Her poems are current in Third Wednesday and Panoplyzine.

Photo by Philipp Torres on Unsplash

Last October

18 July 2023 /

Poetry by John Surowiecki

The mountain laurel is as green as the
maples are orange. Deer visit as if on cue,
hoovering the seeds we left for doves
and newly arrived juncoes.

Anything to do with spring and summer, with lilacs
and irises and that wistful pneumonic yellow,
is long gone, escaped in the raw humidity of

night. The wigs of dead leaves
are already caught up in scattered whirlwinds.
It’s clear we don’t have much time together.

Rainwater that leaks from the driveway gravel
has pooled in unlikely places,
not the swales that engineering has intended.
The silence between a breath and the breath that

follows it seems to last forever. October
is no longer with us: you’ve taken its place.
It needs a new face, yours, a new voice, yours.

It needs your swallows and mourning gnats
your own phrase on the fiddle which everyone can hear:
you, the season of leaving, have your music too.

John Surowiecki is the author of fourteen books of poetry. His latest, The Place of the Solitaires: Poems from Titles by Wallace Stevens, was recently published by Wolfson Press. John is the recipient of the Poetry Foundation Pegasus Award, the Nimrod Pablo Neruda Prize, the Washington Prize and other awards.

Photo by Faith Crabtree on Unsplash

Farewell Season

23 November 2022 /

Poetry by Sharon Whitehill

Poinciana, Your branches speak to me of love.

Buddy Bernier

The mellow close of a Florida day,
seats reserved on the wraparound porch
of a renovated Victorian manse:
a celebrative meal with my sister and Rick
before they head north for the season.

Alone on my side of the table,
I mirror their mutual delight
at the flamboyant tree across the road.
All of us awed by its scarlet-orange blossoms
ablaze in the pre-sunset light.

Snapping a series of photos,
I yield to the impulse
to sling my arm over Rick’s shoulder—
this brother-in-law, for so long a vexation,
gentled now as the soft evening air.

I lift my wine in a toast to the evening,
the bright-burning tree,
and our season together.

Now here comes Linda, our friend,
flashing a ring: I got married!
Though her exuberance fades
on hearing my news.

I was afraid of that, she sighs,
when I only saw three of you here.

A comment that crystallizes our mood.
The Portuguese call it saudade:
the sweet wistfulness of reluctant goodbyes,
honed to an edge by our silent awareness
of one empty chair at the table.

Sharon Whitehill is a retired English professor from West Michigan now living in Port Charlotte, Florida. In addition to poems published in various literary magazines, her publications include two biographies, two memoirs, two poetry chapbooks, and a full collection of poems.

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