Friday morning

Here is a poem by Stanley Kunitz.

While the poem is quite sad, it is also hopeful. Its rendering of "the blue unappeasable sky" leaves an enduring verdict. It is a gentle and kindhearted poem. And [tacitly] strong in its author's positioning.

Robin Redbreast

BY STANLEY KUNITZ

It was the dingiest bird

you ever saw, all the color

washed from him, as if

he had been standing in the rain,

friendless and stiff and cold,

since Eden went wrong.

In the house marked FOR SALE,

where nobody made a sound,

in the room where I lived

with an empty page, I had heard

the squawking of the jays

under the wild persimmons

tormenting him.

So I scooped him up

after they knocked him down,

in league with that ounce of heart

pounding in my palm,

that dumb beak gaping.

Poor thing! Poor foolish life!

without sense enough to stop

running in desperate circles,

needing my lucky help

to toss him back into his element.

But when I held him high,

fear clutched my hand,

for through the hole in his head,

cut whistle-clean . . .

through the old dried wound

between his eyes

where the hunter’s brand

had tunneled out his wits . . .

I caught the cold flash of the blue

unappeasable sky.

And here is a poem by Elizabeth T. Gray Jr. [My dear friend Elizabeth read this poem at our Salon class on Wednesday.] This too is a poem of sadness. And with an ending that promises a bit of hope. A tilted and shorter version of sadness--but from afar. With an amendment. It is like a borrowed commentary.

NIGHTBIRD

ELIZABETH T. GRAY JR.

The many-colored bird flew from tree to tree

up to the top of the hill and saw

that it was still the middle of the night

and flew back down.

In the dark a farmer in his small field of maize

thought, not unreasonably, that it was a crow

and with his slingshot killed it.

This happens all the time.

With thoughts, for example.

It is as though in the writing of such encounters, both poets create a bit of order amid the sadness and consequentialness of such deeds that take place in this world of ours.