This week’s poem, Katherine Hagopian Berry’s “Prayer for the warblers, dead on my houselot,” is a lyric of omens and loss. I love this poem’s leaps of imagery, its singing unions of words, and all the wings held in its final words.

Berry’s work has appeared in The Café Review, SWWIM and Feral, among other places. Her first collection, “Mast Year,” was published in 2020. She is a poetry reader for the Maine Review. 

Prayer for the warblers, dead on my houselot

By Katherine Hagopian Berry

gold necks stretched cold,
rigor mortis, everything frozen,

even the candleflame
drowning in its bathtub of wax.

It was an omen, you say,
drugs, isolation, two lost birds

together in a fresh budding tree
pulsebeats, their brokewings

dapple to dapple until cold
snapped, dawnsong, trillalarm, call

your hand on the phone, seeking
some high nest, the thinnest freest bow.

You say every candle can channel
spirits inflamed, wait for it to flower

even in glass jars, even this old prayer
say heaven, say, home of many wings.

Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “Prayer for the warblers, dead on my houselot” copyright © 2022 by Katherine Hagopian Berry, is forthcoming in “LandTrust” (NatureCulture Publishing). It appears by permission of the author.