One August Afternoon by Mary Ellen Redmond

One August Afternoon

The birds gather at my birdbath,
bathing and drinking as if it were a pool party.

The chickadees and sparrows
flit and twitch, alight and leave.

That chickadee there, never rests, pecks
at the water, her head moving, always alert.

One wren flutters in, splashes about,
chittering the entire time.

Sit here long enough, and you’ll notice
how the sun filters through the oak leaves,

moves across the yard highlighting:
a blue hydrangea, a pine bough, patch of ferns.

One little sparrow, after some hesitation
sits on the rim, sips, throws her head back.

I see the rippling
of her delicate white throat.

The rippling of her throat
is enough and too much,

in the same way a fiddlehead
resembles a baby’s curled fist,

or when one considers the
tessellation of a honeycomb.

In our neighbor’s yard,
two teenage girls are in the pool again.

I hear them splashing and arguing.
They’ve been bickering all week.

*

Mary Ellen Redmond’s poems have appeared in The Drunken Boat, Free State Review, Comstock Review, Cape Cod Review, Rattle, ONE ART, and The Cortland Review, but the publication she is most proud of is the poem tattooed on her son’s ribcage. A former slam poet, she represented Cape Cod at the National Poetry Slam Competition in Providence, RI. She has been featured twice on WCAI’s Poetry Sundays and her interview with poet Greg Orr was featured in The Drunken Boat. Her poem “Fifty-Six Days” earned a Best of the Net Nomination in 2016 and “Joy is not made to be a crumb” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2024. She recently placed second in the 2024 Joe Gouveia Outermost Poetry Contest judged by Marge Piercy. The Ocean Effect, her second chapbook, was published by Finishing Line Press. Her third chapbook I Have One Student will be published in June 2026.