BIRDLAND JOURNAL

Celebrating Northern California Voices

Wren by Kathryn Jordan

My loved one said the poem helped.
I needed this, she wrote.
Out of my chest, the wren, flicking
its tiny pert tail, hopped along the fence
that keeps the world of heartache out.
Things would be alright now.
The wren’s white eye liner, delicate
hope drawn lovely, invited me.
My beloved would stay strong now,
never worry me again with her silence;
the poem touched her knowing self.
In the pith of that thought,
the wren vanished over the fence.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kathryn Jordan’s poems appear in the New Ohio Review, the Comstock Review, Crosswinds, and Birdland, among others, and are forthcoming in The Sun and Oberon.  Winner of the San Miguel de Allende Writers Conference Prize for Poetry and the Sidney Lanier Poetry Award, her book is “Riding Waves” (Finishing Line Press, 2018.)  She’s a finalist for this year’s Tucson Festival of Books Literary Prize, New Ohio Review Prize for Poetry and Comstock Review’s Jessie Bryce Niles Chapbook Contest. Kathryn loves to hike the East Bay hills, translating bird song to poems whenever possible.

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