The Safety of the Trees
POETRY
by Daniel Bourne
We’ve all seen that same bird
make for the treeline
the gunsights trained
as if a world can be created and destroyed
that quickly.
But the bird
doesn’t know
if this next breath, this next
pump of wings
will be its last act or not, its legs
finding purchase, the blood
migrating
the well known routes of its body.
Or if it will slam down
in the hard November field, giving
much joy to the dirt clods around it,
which never
ask questions, which gladly
take advantage of any drink
offered
to slake their constant thirst.
Daniel Bourne is the author of several books including The Household Gods, which was published by the Cleveland State University Poetry Center in 1995. His poems have appeared in such journals as Field, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Conduit, Boulevard, Guernica, Salmagundi, Yale Review, Pleiades, Quarterly West, Willow Springs, Witness, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, Plume, New Letters, Indiana Review, Many Mountains Moving, and Cimarron Review. Until his recent retirement, Bourne taught in the English Department and in the Environmental Studies Program at The College of Wooster in Ohio. The founding editor and current translation editor of Artful Dodge, he has also been the recipient of four Ohio Arts Council poetry fellowships and a Fulbright fellowship for the translation of younger Polish poets. Since 1980, he has lived periodically in Poland. Bourne’s translations of Polish poets appear widely, including in River Styx, Quarterly West, Willow Springs, Northwest Review, Partisan Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Colorado Review, Mid-American Review, Plume, and other literary journals.
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