Two Poems by Beverley Fry

Song Tree

At 3 pm
chattering bird-babble
shakes us from the house,
a flying orchestra,
one thousand
morphing birds swirl over,
to settle in the ash.

A dressing of starlings
trinket up bare boughs;
notes on a score,
black cut-out’s,
feather flat
and facing south.

This tree-break interval
this highway rest
for winging minstrels,
one body in their flight
their perch, their song.

A silent siren call
and branches lift,
as shadows rise in shoals,
mid-verse, move on.



White Water

A sheep-shorn hungry land
wind dry and lonely.
Scarred rust red,
with a dead bracken-crust
over tender shoots.

Ewes knot together,
and lamb in scraped hollows.

Buzzards shadow’s trail
the slopes, skim dips,
scour lichen crevices.

Absolution bursts,
splits rock, bubbles
out through silted bogs.
White water-knife,
slices new routes,
sings cascades, leaps fish
on flooded earth.

Massing river sounds gather
as in a record’s repeating curve,
hissing them to the needle’s skip.
An endless round
sucked central,
to an oceans heaving call.