What Rough Beast | Poem for December 6, 2019

Marjorie Moorhead
What Is Freedom?

Seed party!
Little birds have discovered them
in our blue coffee-pot feeder

They cling to its mesh and feast
on the black oil sunflower seeds
flit, flit

swoop, swoop
back and forth branch to feeder
to branch …

Such happiness outside my November window
with the leaves down
and cold winds blowing in

“Let It Be” comes on the radio
and I sing out
with tears in my eyes

Marie Yovanovitch’s red hair
from last night’s tv
matches the breast of a small bird

Marjorie Moorhead is the author of Survival: Trees, Tides, Song (Finishing Line Press, 2019) and Survival Part 2: Trees, Birds, Ocean, Bees (Duck Lake Books, 2020). Her poems have appeared in HIV Here & Now, Rising Phoenix Review, and Sheila-Na-Gig Online, Porter House Review, Tiny Lit Seed, and other journals, as well as in several anthologies, including Planet in Peril (Fly on the Wall, 2019), edited by Isabelle Kenyon; From The Ashes (Animal Heart, 2019), Amanda McLeod & Mela Blust; Birchsong: Poetry Centered in VT. Vol. II (The Blueline, 2018), edited by Northshire Poets Alice Wolf Gilborn, Carol Cone, David Mook, Marcia Angermann, Peter Bradley and Monica Stillman; and others. She was honored with a tuition scholarship from Indolent Books, in summer 2019, for a week at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA. Moorhead writes from the NH/VT border.

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