Across the lawn, beyond
my gaze, my daughters’ voices
rise-and-falling, lilt-and-laughing
while the robin in the dogwood
breaks a tiny tip of branch and goes
and comes and breaks again,
again, again,
his swoop so close,
even the thrumming of his wings
is in the breath that I exhale.
—
Jennifer L Freed is the author of When Light Shifts, a 2022 finalist for the Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize. Her poems have appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, BODY, Rust and Moth and other journals, and have been nominated for Best of the Net, The Pushcart Prize, and the Orison Anthology.
