wouldn’t you want to be a great blue heron…if you were born again?

Audubon’s The Birds of America, Color-Plate 211by Margaret Hasse

If you, too, dream to be born again

as a bird, wouldn’t you want to be

a great blue heron, rare vagrant

wintering in the Azores and coastal Spain,

snacking on shrimp while wading

on long, beautiful legs? And if
you loved your life as a human who

sheltered in a small house by a lake, you

could summer there again, nesting

in the white pine, fishing on the shore

in the blue Zen of stillness when early

morning ambers through the eastern sky.
 
Margaret Hasse, “Audubon’s The Birds of America, Color-Plate 211” from Summoned. © 2021 Margaret Hasse published by Nodin Press.

Poem on the Fridge:

New stainless steel fridges don’t have magnetic fronts. Hold only ice, water and finger prints.
Go to side for poems, or inhale the food colors and aromas within!

Poem on the Fridge

by Paul Hostovsky

The refrigerator is the highest honor
a poem can aspire to. The ultimate
publication. As close to food as words
can come. And this refrigerator poem
is honored to be here beneath its own
refrigerator magnet, which feels like a medal
pinned to its lapel. Stop here a moment
and listen to the poem humming to itself,
like a refrigerator itself, the song in its head
full of crisp, perishable notes that wither in air,
the words to the song lined up here like
a dispensary full of indispensable details:
a jar of corrugated green pickles, an array
of headless shrimp, fiery maraschino cherries,
a fruit salad, veggie platter, assortments of
cheeses and chilled French wines, a pink
bottle of amoxicillin: the poem is infectious.
It’s having a party. The music, the revelry,
is seeping through this white door.

“Poem on the Fridge” by Paul Hostovsky from Selected Poems. © Futurecycle Press, 2014. Reprinted with permission.

Shrimp

Shrimp Trio

I like shrimp
The stripe of pink;
That curls around
As if to link

The tail to mouth
The in and out;
Micro krill
To spill throughout

The sea beneath
The bed of kelp;
The blue and green
With pink between:

The pink of shrimp
That curls around
Around
Around!

9/22/12
All rights.