One of my favorite childhood memories is of a morning in early July when my friends and I were stopped by a normally grumpy neighbor, the grandfather of a schoolmate, and entreated to “Look! Look! Look there!” When we followed the line of his gnarled finger, we saw a blue we’d never seen before, not even in the bucolic hills of the surrounding Berkshires.

That memory is from the 1960s, a time of great social, cultural, political, and ecological tumult, a time when the grown-up world felt fraught with discord and danger, a time not unlike our own, a time very much in need of a bluebird.

Old Frog Pond Farm Poetry Editor, Terry House

BLUEBIRD

by Wendy Drexler

Blue as sapphires. As Monet’s blue

water lilies. Put-down-your-burdens blue.

Stay-here blue and blue clear through. Lapis blue

of the Virgin’s robe, the deep-sea’s untrammeled blue.

Blue as my valley, my shelter, my twilight mist, my thou-shalt-

not-want. Blue perches on the garden fence, sun catches the bright bead

of its eye. Blue swoops down to the sea of lavender bee balm,

crown vetch, Black-eyed Susans. Bustling bees, bundled

in yellow sweaters, dip

their tongues into

the fringed petals

that sway with

the weight of the bees’

own bodies. I’d forgotten

beauty, its take-your-breath away, its

unexpected grace. How I’m helpless before it.

After days and days keeping the outside out, the inside in,

my heart retracted like a snail. So haggard at the heart, so care-coiled,

as Hopkins calls it. Come, sweet scent of mown grass, come, nectar

of my own sweet sweat. Come bluebird, flying now,

flown—carrying sky on your back.

Wendy Drexler is a recipient of a 2022 artist fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Her third poetry collection, Before There Was Before, was published by Iris Press in 2017. Her poems have appeared in Barrow Street, J Journal, Lily Poetry Review, Nimrod, Pangyrus, Prairie Schooner, Salamander, Solstice, Sugar House, The Atlanta Review, The Mid-American Review, The Hudson Review, The Threepenny Review, and the Valparaiso Poetry Review, among others. She’s been the poet in residence at New Mission High School in Hyde Park, MA, since 2018, and is programming co-chair for the New England Poetry Club. Her fourth collection, Notes from the Column of Memory, will be published in September 2022 by Terrapin Books. Her website is www.WendyDrexlerPoetry.com