GOODBYE

by Jacqueline Coleman-Fried

after Jorie Graham

 

Here it comes, at last, the nightingale,

after wintering in Africa—

black eyes on fire.

 

Listen to me.

Listen.

You searched for me in all England’s 

green patches,

but the land where Keats

wrote his great poem

has lost the low brush, the woodlands

where we nest.

Our wings

have shrunk, the journey

to sunshine and back too far, too ominous.

Why are you listening only now?

Why did you not

protect?

You didn’t notice my long,

thin beak opening wide—

O—

issuing more sounds

than any other bird.

And silence, repeated, like white

between stanzas.

Now you want to learn—

you write like you talk,

without music—

do you know I’m the bird of Ukraine?

Nation

of poets and musicians.

How many are dying? Dying every day.

Our songs call lovers,

shame all who close their ears.

 

And he left then,

the bird,

taking every living thing with him

in his ballooning, throbbing throat,

before I could say goodbye.

 
 
 
Jacqueline Coleman-Fried is a poet living in Tuckahoe, NY. Her work as appeared in The New Verse News, The Orchards Poetry Journal, pacificREVIEW, Quartet Journal, and soon, Consequence, and HerWords Magazine.

CORONAVIRUS SPRING

by Zeina Azzam 

What I want to say to the tulips
that emerged, again, in March:
I am so grateful to count on you.

There is nothing else to gird me
anymore. This beauty almost
makes me weep.

Do you see how different
the world is now?

And they tell me: no,
as we know it, the world is still the same.
The rains arrived this morning.

The nightingale keeps working so hard
to sing. The starling wails.

If sickness comes
I want to be like the wise tulips,
store energy in my heart bulb

and come back after a hard winter,
dressed in bright turbans
of orange and yellow and red.

Zeina Azzam is a Palestinian American poet, editor, and community activist. She volunteers for organizations that promote Palestinian rights and the civil rights of vulnerable communities in Alexandria, Virginia, where she lives. Her poems appear in Pleiades, Mizna, Sukoon Magazine, Split This Rock, the edited volumes Making Mirrors: Writing/Righting by Refugees and Bettering American Poetry, and several other literary journals and anthologies. She holds an M.A. in Arabic literature.