Thursday, January 12, 2006

Jay




Breast feathers veil
clasping feet
snow lightly as down
You, jay, perch in a willow
look straight ahead
look side to side
ready to fly into
grey sky in an instant
but you wait there
like a camera shy model
until the lens is pointed elsewhere

4 comments:

Aisha said...

frozen...yes it looks it

I am crazy about bird poems
this is wonderful...simple and direct

but do you guys call that a jay, in the pic? looks to me like what we call a blue-tit or something

Aisha

Anonymous said...

Perfectly captured both in the poem and in the photo.

petergarner said...

Glad you liked it, Aish & Paula.

Aisha, the bird, Perisoreus canadensis, is in the Corvidae family (crows, jays and magpies) and is commonly called a gray jay (sometimes a Canada jay). But this particular jay does look somewhat like a tit (which we call chickadees in North America); the Gray Jay is quite a bit bigger, however.

hwf said...

Yeah, always happens to me, they fly when I'm not ready to take the picture. Just one suggestion based on probably not reading this right, but might go light instead of lightly on the snow.

Helm.