At night a bird perched on my window
and chirped. Restless, indignant fellow roaming rims of night
tides surge and cascade, plummet. Nobody will say four a.m. is the
time to expect birds in winter, on the longest night of the year.
It’s not as though tsuris arrived just now amid white noise
my bones crack with the weight of toil as the feral creature
basks in a swathe where I listen to the hymns of birdsong
far across the land I sense poppies unbutton before dawn dew.
The spirit flows away into a reserve in evanescence as night
slowly softens into day, emptying earth of stray noises,
the pastoral highlights: cattle, tractor engines, farmers tilling lands
as a crimson shaped orb overwrites color on fronds
small fishes in the river have been stealing silver from the moon.
SNEHA SUBRAMANIAN KANTA is a GREAT scholarship awardee, with a second postgraduate degree in literature from England. Her poem 'At Dusk With the Gods' won the Alfaaz (Kalaage) prize. Her work is forthcoming in Figroot Press, Dirty Paws poetry, VIATOR project and elsewhere. She is the founding editor of Parentheses Journal, a literary initiative that straddles hybrid genres across coasts and climes. She loves horses and autumn.