Poems by Elizabeth Libbey
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Global Warming Ode
by Elizabeth Libbey
Elizabeth lives in western Massachusetts on 40 acres of wildlife refuge.
Mild days, dodged snow-dumps, and birds singing Spring
before Valentine's Day make these old bones
love each tick of minute, day, love each step
out the door, love red rhubarb buds' push
into the pleasant chill of sun-drenched air.
These old bones—how happily each bone holds
the other like a lover, and makes
this skeleton a home for heart, lungs, spleen,
lets my sap flow the way the old maple's
veins release their sweetness under pressure.
Earth's a patient now, bleeding out under
pressure under my feet quietly while
I spend ticking hours tossing loose change
at some shallow wishing well. How happily
our fingers twine as one more day shuts down,
the wine's oaky taste of earth on our tongues.
As we sip, I wonder how much we can
live without until we are all that's left,
I wonder at how our hearts keep thumping
in our ears, wake up, wake up. What words might
be a tourniquet to stop the bleeding?
Keats' Ode to Autumn asks,
Where are the songs of Spring?
Lovers' Day, and the songs are here
lined along the maple's limbs.
What songs, what wings are missing?
What run of syllables across a page
can save? The sweet sap runs.
The days tick down. Tick down.
© Elizabeth Libbey
Pentimento
by Elizabeth Libbey
From Canary Spring 2025
At the gas pump, waiting to be filled,
I glanced up through the windshield—
early Earth was bleeding
through the propane tank, plankton
beaded on the tank's curved steel.
The stand of young white pines behind
blushed ancient red near their crowns.
In the rainbow puddles where the asphalt
had sunk in, huge horned frogs,
throats ballooning, croaked.
Donna, the attendant
I'd known casually for years,
unscrewed the gas cap. Plankton
oozed out around the nozzle
as she jammed it in. She wiped her hands.
I handed her my plastic.
“You must have been running on fumes,”
Donna said.
I pulled out onto Route 2,
pressed the pedal for home to funnel plankton
into my generator ahead of coming night's
unpredictable predicted storms.
I was so anxious I barely noticed
the Deerfield, dammed casual river,
was out of its banks, spreading like a sea
from which I must have crawled.
By the time that had sunk in,
I was already gone by.
© Elizabeth Libbey
World View
Song of the White-Breasted Nuthatch
by Elizabeth Libbey
From Canary Fall 2024
I'm swinging on the suet cage
'upside down,'
as you might say,
I'm hanging on the suet cage,
feet hooked to the wire mesh,
my long bill's
stiletto-down,
I'm looking around,
every thing, no thing,
the breeze ruffling
my feather-whites, oh,
that seed you hang
of the big flower sun,
I like that, I'll
hack that, spear that, oh,
I'll clown away
your lonely,
make it migrate,
I'll stay,
show up early
in a curtain of flurry in
the blue steel air,
I'll let you
believe that to see
the every, see the no
the way you do,
head in the clouds
your one flight,
is the right,
oh, the only
way to be
all this
© Elizabeth Libbey