Poem 2025

Yellow Birds of Morning

by Nicholas Gulig

There are days I wait for days to happen.
The world feels somewhere else.
Without you here
to show me how to keep
the window open
I close my eyes against
the curved blue fog
of morning. The earth is quiet.
Every time I speak a yellow bird
escapes my throat. I wait to see what glistens.

Every time I speak, a yellow bird
escapes my throat and I wait
to see what glistens. The world is here
around me, your voice
a singing distance
in the trees. When I am still
enough to listen
like light, at times, the bird you are
becomes the place I teach myself to sing.

In the place I teach myself to sing
nothing is apart. All of us
arise together, living briefly
in the early morning
sunlit beauty of the flesh. Here,
where I am, there,
where you are, our voices merge
into a chorus. Listen with me,
learn to look. In the ever-growing forest
of my heart, a flock of yellow birds
have landed. Can you hear them?
Their song arrives and we do. They sing to us
and through us. Their voices give to us our names.