A Tidings of Magpies

by Joyce Sutphen It was one of those days when the sun poured gold into the air, and flecks of light floated in shafts that fell through the branches of yellow leaf and green. We’d had dinner at a place on the edge of a lake, and now we were going back to town. There was a simple way to get there, but she didn’t take it. Instead, we drove the country roads with the corn rows flicking by, each one visible for a half second, then gone. “Hello, hello, hello,” they said, then “Good-bye, bye, bye, bye.” The soybeans, we agreed, had turned burgundy overnight, but it was the cornfields we watched, as if we were waiting for the waters to open, as if we might cross over Jordan.

Fairbanks Under the Solstice by  John Haines Slowly, without sun, the day sinks toward the close of December. It is minus sixty degrees. Over the sleeping houses a dense fog rises—smoke from banked fires, and the snowy breath of an abyss through which the cold town is perceptibly falling. As if Death were a voice made visible, with the power of illumination... Now, in the white shadow of those streets, ghostly newsboys make their rounds, delivering to the homes of those who have died of the frost word of the resurrection of Silence. Honey-Haired Girl has moved to Alaska. The Land of the Midnight Sun. The Last Frontier. Hubby was up there for about two weeks to get her settled. I was just up there for Thanksgiving. She's doing well; thank you for asking. I believe the lowest temperatures were hovering at -18, and the sun is up for about 5 hrs. And, by "up," I mean it drifts along the horizon. It's dark by 4 pm. The roads are essentiall...

Thanks by WS Merwin, 1927 Listen with the night falling we are saying thank you we are stopping on the bridges to bow for the railings we are running out of the glass rooms with our mouths full of food to look at the sky and say thank you we are standing by the water looking out in different directions. back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging after funerals we are saying thank you after the news of the dead whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you looking up from tables we are saying thank you in a culture up to its chin in shame living in the stench it has chosen we are saying thank you over telephones we are saying thank you in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators remembering wars and the police at the back door and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you in the banks that use us we are saying thank you with the crooks in office with the rich and fashionable unchanged we go on saying thank you thank you wi...

Remnants still visible           by  Marge Piercy Robins migrate, all schoolchildren learn but here on the Cape, every winter a flock forms and stays, long frigid months after their compatriots have flown south. They live deep in the woods on hips and berries wizened by cold. Sometimes they appear here among the feeder birds, one or two almost outcasts. Off Alaska when humpback whales leave in fall as the waters freeze and the world turns white, heading for mating grounds off Hawaii and Mexico, certain whales remain. What makes a creature stay when almost all of its kind have moved on? In burned-out areas of Detroit, you’ll notice one house still wears curtains, a bike locked to the porch. Sometimes in the suburbs among tract houses with carpets of grass one farmhouse lurks, maybe even with a barn. I imagine its owner grey and stubborn, still growing the best tomatoes for miles, refusing to plant inedible gr...