Out Oak Island Road
In swales and furrows, low-slung fields
fill with rain for channel, pool, pond, and
down came cranes, swans, geese in flocks wheeling,
calling, veering to a stall to settle muttering in their
restless multitudes, all ruffle and strut, feeding,
preening, dancing, drifting in their radiance that
brought me closer, stepping, stopping, gazing, gasping
at their finery, stunned by their numbers, vast bounty
of beauty in their wild and ancient abundance, owning
earth before any human claim—until I came too close
and they beat upward, clamoring, stammering, hammering
air with their singing wings, calling down my name
in shame, and all our names to one another as they
billowed up, filled the sky, then left it empty.
Kim Stafford’s poem “Out Oak Island Road” (reprinted with permission from As the Sky Begins to Change, Red Hen Press, 2024) was recorded with pianist Hunter Noack (www.inalandscape.org) playing Domenico Scarlatti’s Sonata in b minor, K. 87 at All Classical Radio in Portland, OR as part of All Classical’s 2023 Poetry Project: The Improv Sessions. This original radio series was produced by Suzanne Nance. Learn more at www.allclassical.org.
Birding for the Blind
Without any clutter of color, wing-bar, breast-band,
of eye-line, or cap, without binoculars dangling or
field guide flopped open, but standing spare in the open,
you turn your head to hear a clear yodel, whistle, trill,
fuzzy tremolo, falling flute of a dark minor third—
in the thicket someone calling hey sweetie, hey sweetie so
you step closer, with your stick and hunger, as someone else
says cooks for you, cooks for you which makes you turn
to the wind’s direction to hear whichity whichity whichity,
some arpeggio of joy, some Mozart of this meadow, some
Chopin in the hedgerow, some lost love calling you to kneel,
to fumble together a nest of grass, cupped with thistledown.
“Birding for the Blind” is reprinted by permission from As the Sky Begins to Change (Red Hen Press, 2024).
Read more poetry by Kim Stafford appearing in Terrain.org: four poems, four poems, two poems, and the Letter to America poem, “Dear America.”
Header photo by Delmas Lehman, courtesy Shutterstock. Photo of Kim Stafford by Bob Reynolds.