Who can ignore a red bird?
I saw one after the big snowstorm last month. All of the park was wintered. It made me.
forget.
Just see the bird, and here, I am writing another bird into a poem. When you stop to look at a bird, you relax into it. When you stop and think oh are you beautiful, you are already with that bird. A bike rode past me sounding like a bird. And yet,
maybe it was the world relaxing into me, like joy,
like sunlight.
*
What is my joy?
My joy is when I’m past it, past the fear, past the decisions and the hindering.
My joy is when I feel languished.
My joy is when I ease into fine.
My joy is a laugh that stops me.
*
I’m always showing everything.
This is the red bird at the ice branch
This is the red bird of my joy
This is the red bird of my fear and my haunts and my sorrows
And yet,
The bird looks.
I look.
—
Leah Umansky is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently, Of Tyrant (Word Works Books, 2024). She earned her MFA in Poetry at Sarah Lawrence College and has curated and hosted The Couplet Reading Series in NYC since 2011. She is the creator of the Stay Brave Substack which encourages women-identifying creatives to inspire other women-identifying creatives to stay brave in their creative pursuits. Her creative work has been featured on PBS, and in such places as The New York Times, The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A Day, USA Today, Poetry, Bennington Review, and American Poetry Review. She is an educator and writing coach who has taught workshops to all ages at such places as Poetry School London, Poets House, Hudson Valley Writers Center, Memorial Sloan Kettering, and elsewhere. She is working on a fourth collection of poems Ordinary Splendor, on wonder, joy and love. She can be found at www.leahumansky.com
