Tag Archives: bird

Sonnet: Jerome Betts, ‘Fly-By’

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(For S. H. W.)

Bench slats, warm-sleeved in lichen’s rough grey-green,
Sandwiches, ivy’s shade, the garden scene,
Dozens of white-tailed bumblebees, a hum
Among the clustered heads of marjoram.

Background to thoughts that intertwine and drift . . .
A sudden sombre sickle shape – a swift
So low, so near, not distant in the sky,
Skims past, a flash of wings and beak and eye.

Why come that strangely close? Drawn down in chase
Of food, despite the human form and face?
Why did it circle once, then speed away
Towards the woods and cliffs that fringe Lyme Bay?

Soon, news – an old friend gone whose joy was birds.
It almost seemed a farewell without words.

*****

Jerome Betts writes: “The passage of the swift so close I could glimpse its shining eye was a memorable moment in these times when I see only a very occasional two or three usually high in the sky. It resulted in a sunny and summery ten lines concluding, A brief encounter, but it made the day. Some hours later the news came of an old school friend’s death in France. This completely altered any feeling about the event. I suppose the subtext of the aftermath was something like Hardy’s Hoping it might be so, which nearly became the title.”  

‘Fly-By’ was first published in Snakeskin.

Jerome Betts edits Lighten Up Online in Devon, England. His verse appears in Amsterdam Quarterly, Light, The Asses of Parnassus, The New Verse News, The Hypertexts, Snakeskin, and various anthologies.

Photo: “Swift (Apus apus)” by Billy Lindblom is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Melissa Balmain, ‘Bird in the Hand’

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It doesn’t caw or hunt or fly.
It can’t peck anybody’s eye,
or even grow a single lousy feather.
One-clawed, no match for any tom,
it’s stranded on a leafless palm,
regardless of the season, time or weather.

Yet what’s the bird that, all alone,
sticks up for you when gibes have flown
and you don’t care to verbalize or linger;
when someone’s mocked you to your face
or cut you off or swiped your space –
what bird? The one that moonlights as a finger.

*****

Melissa Balmain writes: “I’m pretty sure this would have been the Sphinx’s riddle if she had guarded the Brooklyn Bridge.”

‘Bird in the Hand’ was first published in The Rotary Dial and is collected in Walking in on People © Melissa Balmain, 2014. Used by permission of Able Muse Press.

Melissa Balmain’s third poetry collection, Satan Talks to His Therapist, is available from Paul Dry Books (and from all the usual retail empires). Balmain is the editor-in-chief of Light, America’s longest-running journal of light verse, and has been a member of the University of Rochester’s English Department since 2010. She will teach a three-day workshop on comic poetry at the Poetry by the Sea conference in Madison, CT, in May 2024.

Photo: “A bird in hand” by Whatsername? is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.