Bird Sounds & Sunlight
Hello! You are welcome to settle in and enjoy some poetry. Here you’ll find poems, rhyming and free verse, by Michael Orlando Mancarella. A new one comes out every Saturday. Read here on the blog, or if you would prefer, you may sign up to receive the poems as an email newsletter (also for free), at the bottom of the page.
Archive
Sparrow Speak
I hear squeaks with round
edges
and energetic inflection
she
chirps into the sunny afternoon
there
must be meaning in this
pattern
of sound received by
other
sparrows otherwise it’s
pure
art or pure
joy
or all in one the
song
projected into afternoon
sunlight
written summer 2014
Coffee Stir
the way I hold spoon
to a coffee stir this
hold spoon is the hold spoon
of Grandma’s when she
would hold spoon to a coffee stir
it just seems the same
all these years later
written May 2024
We Have Doves, They Are Called Mourning
*
She sits on the flat rock
in front of the light
that shines on the fountain.
This is where they sat.
*
The day before, the woman
found feathers strewn in the yard.
She assumed it was the result
of a hawk feeding. Her best guess:
the feathers were of a mourning dove.
*
And now in the gathering dusk
the dove sits alone on a rock
near the flowing water.
She honors her name.
She gives her presence
to one’s absence.
written May 2023
Something of Me
bird (beyond my sight) you sing
in lush tones I know not
your form / your name you find
something of me among
wood & brick bringing
your outside through glass
like the forest is
floating here in my mind
written May 2024
Summer’s Beginning
The balcony bathed in sun.
I sit out on it alone, reading
a poet who was tempered by solitude.
I drink in the sunlight.
Thunderstorms forecast for the next week.
The boards hot on my feet,
I slip inside, cool & dark,
the book still warm
in my hands.
written June 2023
My Guitar Holds the Sky
In the gloss
of its handsome
brown varnished wood
shows
the sun-draped dual window
and the blue of sky beyond.
written May 2024
Illumining
I watch bugs and moths
batter around above the lot
beneath the light illumining the lot
and think of earlier, feeling alone
enough not to go out on the balcony
but still going out onto the balcony,
and come inside, still thinking,
now of 115-year-old poems
and how emotions are not unique
to any of us, and I drink from
a glass of tap water that is
purified water from a lake.
written summer 2014
They Wander
They wander out from my memory
somewhere in California.
I first found them,
these pairs of pants,
in a store in New England.
They were bold:
a velvety blue pair
and a green one too.
I tried and they fit me,
and the price was good.
I didn’t put them back on after that.
Neatly folded in a flat box
they made it into the compact car
going to California.
I remember taking them out
in our room in San Diego
and holding them,
their colors and softness,
this representation of part of me
that felt bold & expressive,
and then placing them back in the box.
After that, the box falls out of memory.
But what that box held
is still somehow with me
as I sit here in faded blue jeans
on a cool spring day
with a dream of song.
written May 2023
Autumn Morning
The sun breaks through the east
and enters my home. The light is
crisp and bare. It stretches
all the way to the back of the kitchen.
I stand at the slider
and look out at the dewy morn.
I’m drinking my coffee. Soon
I’ll say some prayers,
the ones that come to me.
written October 2023
The Trees in the Cemetery
The trees in the cemetery
burn with the color of autumn.
They grow spindly and bare at their tops.
The leaves above Dad’s grave
are still green. How old this grief?
18 years. Walking away
I see Dad walking from
his father’s grave
in tears.
composed in October 2023
Recently the Moon
Recently the moon was visible from my balcony — a rarity! Tonight, I stepped out, into November’s cold air, and thought to see if it were there again:
looking for the moon
I found a couple stars
written November 2021
walking under a pine tree
walking under a pine tree
the falling snow
pauses
written March 2022
A Small White Moth
I saw a small
white moth like
a tuft of fluffy snow
amidst the summer day
that seemed to struggle
with flight. It labored
upward, then, like a
kerchief on a string,
fluttering and falling,
was drawn down to the soil
beneath a bush. May it
find a good place to rest,
I thought, thinking
it had come to the end of its life.
Then
later that day I saw
a tuft of white, a moth
I took to be the same, in strength
and in flight, perhaps
earlier what I saw
had been the beginning.
summer 2014
A Little Joy
For stretches of my life
anxiety kept me
from looking forward to things.
And now, here, something little:
I just anticipated walking through a piece of sunlight.
October 2021
Morning Sun
Sitting in my living room
in morning sun,
the shadow of my fingers
on my cupped hand
recedes
when I open fully the hand
into the light.
January 2024
A Warm Day in February
My step
more confident
on the path today
ice and snow
softer
and more ground
bare
passing near the pond
I see meltwater
on its ice and am brought
to my childhood backyard
it’s like a pond back there
Mom would say when
the water would pool up
around the big pine
and eventually freeze
then on a warm day
hold melt we’d
scuff and glide
on it in boots
in this memory I feel
a simple time
and my ability
to recall that time
might show that something
of that happiness
is present today.
written February 2023