Folded Word
Exploring the world, one voice at a time.
Autumnal Shift
Flock of blackbirds moving over the house, silent as they almost always never are — heading south, one wing beat at a time. Leaving behind the September cries of the finches, (in French, no less — Vite! Vite! Vite! / Quick! Quick! Quick!); the urgency shouted down by jeers from the blue jays, the mockery of magpies, the crows, so seldom able to approach in silence: “Hah!” they shout. “We’ll stay!”
on the lake island
the trees bare of white egrets
soon, their leaves bare, too
Over my shoulder, the sudden arrival of a small flock of bush tits, making their presence known only by the bell-like cheep and the taffeta rustle of their number, scavenging the mock-orange for seeds and delicate bits of leaf ends. Hello and goodbye.
©2019 by Kathleen Cain
A response to Folded Field Notes : Migration
Kathleen Cain is a poet and nonfiction writer. Her poetry has been widely published in literary magazines and journals for many years. She was a contributing editor The Bloomsbury Review. She has published two nonfiction books – The Cottonwood Tree: An American Champion (Big Earth Publishing, 2007), which was nominated for a Colorado Book Award and selected for the Nebraska 150 Book Project, in honor of 150 years of statehood; and Luna: Myth and Mystery (Johnson Books, 19919, o.p.). She is a charter member of the Rocky Mountain Chapter of the Here and Now Society, an informal group of haiku enthusiasts who (mostly) meet quarterly to explore and share the world of haiku, haibun, and related forms. She’s been writing haiku at least since 2002, and is mostly faithful to a daily practice.
3 Comments on “Autumnal Shift”
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Folded Word 
Because the author’s name doesn’t appear at the top, I started reading this and thought, “oh, that sounds like Kathleen Cain.” Her words are her signature. Specifically lovely, as always.
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I like the flow of this prose poem especially with the haiku presenting a lovely image. The reader joins the poet in bird song and a flurry of feathered wings.
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So gorgeous and full of sound and movement! I loved “the taffeta rustle”! Thank you, Kathleen!
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