A dozen dark shapes silhouetted
in the dawn tracery of our Chinese tallow tree.[1]
As usual a few flickers[2]
yanking fruits but what are those
smaller…? Robins![3] The first sign of spring
in January already.
Exhilarating
but one of those endless clichés.
Poetry Web site oh dear:
robin's egg blue
redbreast
hopping
splashing in the birdbath
worms, berries
dawn chorus.
Well yes, I love watching robins
flutter-empty the flowerpot saucer
under the Chinese tallow.
Obviously enjoying.
Yeah yeah so what else is new?
Worm dried stiff on the sidewalk
must have been dropped around dawn.
No hopping seen and no robin
but she was there.
Yeah yeah.
Robin calls
from trees far and near.
On the front porch in slippers and bathrobe
bathed in cool air
watching the east color red, I hear
another spring's beginning beauty.
Oh dear.
William Carlos Williams got me started
about the song:
“Clearly!
Speaks the red-breast his behest. Clearly!
clearly!”[4]
Red-breast? Give me a break.
Not possible even for Williams
to escape cliché.
How about others?
Sibley: “often two or three phrases
alternately repeated over and over
plurri, kliwi, plurri, kliwi…”[5]
No cliché, but a bit clinical.
Mom used to tell me “Cheery cheery cheery!” Better.
Clearly cheery.
Hackneyed or what?
[1] Triadica sebifera
[2] Northern flicker, Colaptes auratus
[3] American robin, Turdus migratorius
4 Paterson by William Carlos Williams. Book One (1946), p. 20. New Directions Publishing Co., New York, 1992.
5 The Sibley Guide to Birds by David Allen Sibley, p. 403. National Audubon Society, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2000.