February And Beyond

February's First

The sunlight somehow takes longer
to reach me today.

Yellowing bone: a dead tree displays
its stripped stark sculpture in a boggy field.

Along the damp wind's chilled edge
a packet of sparrows but

most birds, unflocked, fly swift and singly
from cover to cover.

Lowering clouds have squeezed out
what juice there was:

they have tossed away the husk
the pith the zest,

and rainstreaked windows again.

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