Field Pansy

My nectar wooed the laden bees tumbling
in the grass,

flagrant below the sun, every pistil
shuddering

as their busy legs brushed me with
fertile news

Now there is less in the air,
less show,

less reaching towards the other
So be it

Bunkered, self-contained, fed
rations

of the known, resilience burrows
each looped

gene, makes my descendants
pale duplicates

Hoarding and blameless, I drop
little pollen

in the world’s begging cup,
against present

and expected loss, unfold scant
shrunken blooms

Fall

When the hatchling fell from the porch rafter,
I did not tell my child that her father
had toppled the nest. Between pricks of feathers
we saw skin less than a baby’s skin, pink as the first
fragile covering on a burn. I knew its mother
would not come for it huddling on the threshold.

In the night, too small to stand, it dragged
across the porch boards with paperclip wings
until it tipped into a crack. The chick will die—
might have done so anyway, born so late
in summer that the earliest fall leaves
are drifting to the lawn.

These are things adults know. My daughter
proffers the chick in her tender hand. Instead
of mercy, of cracking its skull’s light shell,
I offer suffering, stuff an old yogurt cup with tissues,
tuck the nestling back in the eaves,
lying to my child that its mother will return.

Elizabeth Sylvia’s second collection, Scythe (2026), is forthcoming from River River Books. Her first collection, None But Witches (2022), was the winner of the Three Mile Harbor Book Award. Elizabeth was the winner of the 2023 riverSedge Poetry Prize and has received fellowships from the West Chester Poetry Center and the Longleaf Writers’ Conference. She lives in coastal Massachusetts. elizabethsylviapoet.net.

Published April 15 2025