By Joyce Schmid

I try to keep my mouth shut so she’ll talk to me,
but unsuccessfully, and wondering with every word
about my hunger to be heard—
she a hummingbird at rest, and I so tired.
Her son—a rain cloud on the fishes’ sky—
angles for a large-mouth bass,
while over us, an airplane dangles hook and line.

Wild geese step high like toddlers in the grass,
pecking at a mallard hen,
but the hen’s the one who finds some food,
outnumbered as she is,
and small and plain, her only ornament
a flash of satin on her wing,
blue as longing.

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Joyce Schmid’s poems have recently appeared in The Hudson Review, Five Points, Literary Imagination, Poetry Daily, and other journals and anthologies. She lives in Palo Alto, California, with her husband of over half a century.