Poem of the Day: “Birds on a Wire” by John C. Mannone, Frequent Contributor and Poet of the Week

Songs of Eretz Poetry Review is pleased to present “Birds on a Wire” by John C. Mannone, a Songs of Eretz Frequent Contributor and this week’s Poet of the Week.  The poet’s biography may be found in the “About Our Editor & Frequent Contributors” section.

Birds on a Wire

John C. Mannone

A musician-pianist

            with writer’s block

                        gazes outside

as sparrows line up

            on power lines,

                        their silhouettes

perch as musical notes

            on a three-wire bar

                        hung from cross-staffs.

He scribbles their

            arrangement on paper:

                        ink nesting in circles

before his hands

            swoop down,

                        fingers resting light

as feathers on ivory,

            ruffling out

                        the bird-inspired tune:

itself a songbird

            lifting to the heavens—

                        a psalm of praise and thanks,

           

            taking wing.  

Poet’s Notes:  “Birds on a Wire” is a product of a prompt involving a list of ten words and categories obtained from a monthly open mic I attend in Chattanooga: a musical term, a part of a bird, rake, balloon, shuttle, ridge, rile, mash, repulse, scribble. (Only three of these survived the final revision.)

The conflation of the first two items is what led to the poem because they triggered a memory of TV commercial I had seen years earlier—a pianist suffering from “writer’s block” gazed out his studio window and saw birds “scale” the three-phase power lines. Their arrangement gave him the opening chords for a piano rift. Eventually, the poem’s structure emulates a 3-bar structure.