Blue by Sidney Wade

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend May 18, 2016   Blue   Sidney Wade

The great blue song of the earth is sung in all the best venues— treetop, marsh, desert, shore— and on this spring day in the wetlands where, under a late sun, we stand alone and in love with each other and the passing day we watch a cormorant whose eye is ringed in blue diamonds, a shimmering lure, and we love this blue and this dark bird and this deepening sky that pinks and hums in the west, and then   the bird opens his beak and flutters his throat and the late afternoon light illuminates the inside tissue of his mouth which is as blue as his ocular jewelry, as blue as the bluest ocean, as blue as the sky in all its depth, as blue as the back of the small and determined beetle who struggles to roll his enormous dung ball in his own breeding bid to enchant another small blue miracle.            Copyright © 2016 Sidney Wade. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   “We were walking on a lovely evening at Sweetwater Wetlands Park, and I watched a nearby Double-crested Cormorant through my binoculars, admiring his double crests, for which he is named, and which one never sees outside of breeding season. At one point he opened his beak in order to thermo-regulate, and the evening light was slanted just enough to illuminate the inside of his mouth, which was blue!” —Sidney Wade   Sidney Wade is the author of Straits & Narrows (Persea Books, 2013). She has recently retired from teaching at the University of Florida, and splits her time between Gainesville, Florida, and Rangeley, Maine.   Photo credit: Marion Ettlinger  Poetry by Wade   Straits & Narrows (Persea Books, 2013) "Daymark" by Ossian Foley "Meditation for the Silence of Morning" by Adam Clay "Atlantic City Sunday Morning" by Gregory Pardlo Poem-a-Day   Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038