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Live Encounters Poetry & Writing September 2023
Little Echo, poems by Sarah Meehan.
Little Echo
I have been thinking about how a bird
playing throw and catch
with its voice
can wake the echoes in the mountains
and how a dandelion in its youth
is a little echo
of the sun
and how a dandelion in old age
is a little echo
of the moon
and the way puddles and ponds
look like shards of sky
and how the wrinkled face of a
newborn is an echo
from the future
and how the light of a star
is an echo from the past
and the way the letter m
holds the shape of water
and the way my left hand
carries the imprint of my right
so that when they strike
the sound bounces off the evening
releasing the echoes from my palms
to hustle
home to roost.
Wing Prints
It is morning and a voice
is scaling three paired notes
like a stairway to the sky
so it seems if I could give my
whole attention and
yoke myself to its repeating
I could be rising
flight by flight,
flight by flight —
~
Coasting low along the river
a sleek-winged crow
spills its darkness,
a slick
across the water
that spreads
onto the raised-root bank
and gathers as a grass-
bound bird.
~
Emerging from cloud
as though formed of
cloud
a pair of cattle egrets
glide to the fields
where they feed
from the hoof-churned earth
as though sprung
from the earth.
~
At that hour when the sun
turns wool rosy
and the paddocks are filled
with flushed ewes and lambs
the curve-billed ibises
drift by
in fours and sixes
and descend to their roosts
in hush-spun spirals.
© Sarah Meehan
Sarah Meehan’s work has appeared in Crannóg and Cordite Poetry Review. She acknowledges the Jinibara people as the traditional owners and custodians of the land and waterways that are her home.