Poems by Simon Perchik

December Web Feature

by Simon Perchik

*

You feed these birds at night
the way every feather they use
comes from a quarry where the air

darkens with each landing –it’s Tuesday
and you still have not forgotten
their return for seeds, endlessly

weeping for a missing child
a brother, mother though their eyes
are unsure how to close

when listening for a name, a flower
a river –you fill your hand from a bag
as if at the bottom they could hear

an emptiness that is not a night
falling behind step by step on the ground
–how open it was, already grass.

*

And stubborn yet these wicks
warm the light they need
to blossom as stone

then cling, smell from hair
burning inside, clawing for roots
heated by butterflies

and the afternoons coming together
to the light the fire, be a noon
where there was none before.

 

 

Simon Perchik is an attorney, born in 1923, whose poems have appeared in Partisan Review, Poetry, The New Yorker and elsewhere. His most recent collection is The Gibson Poems published in 2019. For more information including free e-books and his essay “Magic, Illusion and Other Realities” please visit his website at www.simonperchik.com.