Poems by Monique Gagnon German

Hope

by Monique Gagnon German

From Canary Summer 2013

Monique lives along the Susquehanna River Basin in south-central Pennsylvania, writing poems above the Codorus Creek watershed.

It is a tender thing,
this morning
with the heat
not yet intense
but building,
the air, cool
at the ground
lifting water
up as beads
on stilts of grass,
miniscule
diamonds
and pearls
free from strings
and necks.
Even the furled
brown fists
of the ferns
in the garden
seem to relax a bit
in anticipation
of some new thing,
swelling in the places
they are still green.

© Monique Gagnon German

How They All Swoop In

by Monique Gagnon German

From Canary Fall 2013

Not vultures quite
flock of ruffled pelicans
picking over what’s left,
tossing whole fish,
tadpoles, crustaceans,
turtles, eggs, into their gullets.
Fights break out, beaks flash,
pecking over everything,
who gets what first,
who is quickest now
that the elders are gone,
no longer loving pod,
caring brood,
now just squawking
squadron angry grief
wrestling, fouling
everything, leaving void,
robbing neighbors’ nests,
forgetting what’s
most important,
who’s here with them,
what’s really left,
their family,
their species.

© Monique Gagnon German

Reviving the Lexicon

by Monique Gagnon German

From Canary Spring 2013

This is a sentence, spliced,
edited out of existence
by three sandpipers
flitting over sand and seaweed
as waves pooled a curved edge
around their spindle legs.

This is half the same thought
as it resumed in the car
on the way home from the beach,
before the third traffic light, red
and the sitting for the green,
the radio and its split personalities
battling for air space.

This is one word from the essay
on new beginnings, a revived string
of syllables and structuring
that began that same evening
but stalled and went silent
as the sun slipped down
into clouds on the horizon
and lit them up peach.

This is one chorus of a ballad
that came up singing
from dinner's macaroni & cheese,
a ditty torn up by the wind
that started after midnight
between two trees,
a gale that left one note hanging
like an orphaned leaf,
twitching either to hang on
or to get free.

This is just one tiny speck of ink
left by the pause of my pen
while I was almost entirely
out of the room in my thinking
about the moon and how it looks
at 3 then 4 in the morning;
how it is just a mirror
to the sun's interruptions
and without those periods
of punctuation, how dark
and glum it would be.