Considering a Cloud, a Bird, and a Poem

 
See how cumulonimbi dress the earth
for dramas passed over by unmoved audiences,
birds clothe salt-marsh and sand-spit, and poems
bear the tender songs of a departing bird.

When the Gentle were dead these inherited their coats
Now they gather in late autumn and quarrel over the air

Hear how birds whisper to the earth
elegies yet unwritten about cumulonimbi,
and clouds and poems rise into ether –
swoosh! – to bicker plainly then disperse.

Demanding something for their shadow that are naked
And silent and learning

Sense the ways poems search the earth
for knowledge of how, like birds
and clouds learning to fly, the word
first formed in air. Together

a cloud, a bird and a poem are considered
with such shape and symmetry as              stretch
songs over bone and sky, such colour and vision
as remember the first poem, and all poems since.

As if they are all wing and wisp.
As if they are all spirit and turbulence.
 
 
 
 
 
* Found lines from W. S. Merwin’s ‘Crows on the Northern Slope’.
 

Siobhan Harvey

Siobhan Harvey is the author of the poetry collection, Lost Relatives (Steele Roberts NZ, 2011), the book of literary interviews Words Chosen Carefully: New Zealand Writers in Discussion (Cape Catley, 2010), and the anthology Our Own Kind: 100 New Zealand Poems about Animals (Random House, 2009). Recently, her poetry has been published in Evergreen Review (Grove Press, US), Five Poems Journal (Ned), Meanjin (Aus), Shenandoah (US), Stand (UK) and Structo (UK). The Poetry Archive (UK) showcases a Poet’s Page devoted to Harvey’s work here.

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