Poems by Louise Gwathmey Weld

Blue Bird

by Louise Gwathmey Weld

From Canary Spring 2020

Louise lives on the coast of South Carolina on a tidal creek in the Charleston Harbor Watershed.

Green fuzz tickles the sleeping birch.
Violets press through grass, clover and mint,
cense the yard with spring.

Small feathery architect, exuberant,
lands on blue plastic covering the mower
to extract a thread of sky for his nest.

But now, dangles from this dream-stopping
gallows, wings a stiff tangle. rusted breast,
tight-beaked with the unyielded string;

ruffle of unintended, unwilling, unable
twisted neck
in this noose he would not

and then could not relinquish.
I am joined to this suspended daze,
lashed to the stillness of wings.

© Louise Gwathmey Weld

Drought

by Louise Gwathmey Weld

From Canary Summer 2020

Heat downgrades ambition,
jaundices the wilting plants.
Even those who believe in the seasons are discouraged
by their own listlessness. A hot breeze flutters
the feathers of disinterested gulls.
The marsh bends before a drought of salt.
There is no river making glad the city of God,
but a steaming creek whose heat can barricade
the land from the consolation of clouds.
Musicians hear all these discrepancies as notes.
Poets feel the vowels of sweat and dig for wells in the clouds.
Novelists are shaken by the fiction of truth and write stories
with no ending. We want to believe in the view
of the river birch: it leans towards the creek and draws the sap
of current to its roots. It waits for the rising tide.
The weather forecast is for a band of storms,
wind, and hail the size of quarters,
a violence we can scarcely contemplate.
The rain we seek is neither monsoon nor cat
but rain like the relief of light in childhood nightmares.
Finally, at night, we hear it: steady, insistent,
it comes without fanfare, waking memory in all growing things,
calling out the frogs, setting the earthworms to crawl
in droves across the grass. And we fall into the dream of a play
in which we all have parts but have forgotten all our lines.

© Louise Gwathmey Weld

Life in the Suburbs

by Louise Gwathmey Weld

From Canary Summer 2020

In the suburbs there are
covenants, for goodness sake
to keep us all in our proper places
our cars in their paved driveways,
all dogs on leashes, all poop in bags.
The houses don’t all look the same
but in your mind, you can’t tell the difference.
According to a pop-up sign, the mosquito patrol
has been at work down the street. Even now
the garbage truck collects all our excesses.
Except for the scraping of a new roof
this morning the predictable sounds and
comings and goings to work and school,
the lightly snoring dog. Unexpected,
the declaration of the rooster,
(loud from several streets over)
insistent that it is morning and the hens are laying.
There is no quieting his screech and cackle.
All fences insufficient, the air acoustical
with his narcissistic racket. We all have to deal
with the intrusion of him. Indignant— ‘For heaven’s sake,
this is not the country and aren’t chickens against the rules?’
He rattles the air with all the sounds of love and loss
he’s the Prophet of Rabble-Rousing in the kingdom of calm.
During the night some critter has gnawed a hole through my porch screen.
Even now, a loud-mouthed sparrow is clinging
to the same screen, scratching its way in.

© Louise Gwathmey Weld