I live dead center in the Tygart RiverValley, which is expanding, now, with light.On frog-pond ice, a chickadee tipshis cap each time he dips at the base of a leafthat’s billowed just enough, night-long,to fashion a crack of water.I did not always feel this way—or soonenough—but when the mountainsbegin to pink, I am a half-buried wickthat won’t stay lit for long. Still,everything glows. It winks.In the rose, a sparrow whistles a tuneit took a full season for me to heed—there’s a time to be silent and a time to speak.When I wipe my eyes, they’ve gone.
Songbirds, Midwinter
Bill King
Feature Date
- September 6, 2024
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“Songbirds, Midwinter” from BLOODROOT: by Bill King.
Published by Mercer University Press in 2023.
Copyright © 2023 by Bill King.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Permission granted by Mercer University Press.
Bill King was professor of English at Davis & Elkins College. The 2021 Heartwood Poetry Award winner and author of the chapbook THE LETTING GO, his work appears in 100 Word Story, The Cincinnati Review, Appalachian Review, and other journals. This full-length collection, his first, commemorates a life lived in the Blue Ridge and Appalachian Mountains.
"Central Appalachia is one of the most biodiverse regions in the world. The land swarms with flora and fauna that bursts with life and death, both, with life as death, death as life. BLOODROOT knows what the land knows. Each of these exquisitely crafted, deeply ecological, humid poems accumulate into a "bildungsroman" for the grown. May it be offered at every library, every hospital chapel, every seed store in the valleys. Bill King has given us an instant classic for the tradition."
—Rebecca Howell
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