M. Bartley Seigel
The Good Omen
On this first day of the new year, a young crow traps her head
between two narrow pickets in the garden fence, and you
rush outside to free the bird before she snaps her own neck.
You in your black sweater, silver hair lifting behind you
in the cold wind, certainty in your cerulean eyes.
The crow, liberated, exulting from your upraised hands
into a tangled thicket of future hopes and sorrows.
M. Bartley Seigel is a poet, editor, teacher, former Poet Laureate of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow, and the author of This Is What They Say (Typecast Publishing, 2013). His poems have frequently appeared in literary journals like POETRY, Michigan Quarterly Review, About Place, Fourth River, and Thrush. He lives on the Keweenaw Peninsula, Ojibwe homelands and Treaty of 1842 territory.
Return to May 2023 Edition
On this first day of the new year, a young crow traps her head
between two narrow pickets in the garden fence, and you
rush outside to free the bird before she snaps her own neck.
You in your black sweater, silver hair lifting behind you
in the cold wind, certainty in your cerulean eyes.
The crow, liberated, exulting from your upraised hands
into a tangled thicket of future hopes and sorrows.
M. Bartley Seigel is a poet, editor, teacher, former Poet Laureate of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow, and the author of This Is What They Say (Typecast Publishing, 2013). His poems have frequently appeared in literary journals like POETRY, Michigan Quarterly Review, About Place, Fourth River, and Thrush. He lives on the Keweenaw Peninsula, Ojibwe homelands and Treaty of 1842 territory.
Return to May 2023 Edition