This month’s Versed in Florida is with poet Sidney Wade. She teaches English at the University of Florida. Her poems and translations of foreign language poems have appeared in a wide variety of journals, including Poetry, The New Yorker, and The Paris Review. WADE's Turkish poetry translations will be published in October. She’s now helping younger poets as the editor of UF’s literary Journal “Subtropics” and as a teacher of one undergraduate and one graduate poetry class each semester. She spoke with WGCU’s Amy Tardif.
Birding at the Dairy
We’re searching
for the single
yellow-headed
blackbird
we’ve heard
commingles
with thousands
of starlings
and brown-headed
cowbirds,
when the many-
headed body
arises
and undulates,
a sudden congress
of wings
in a maneuvering
wave that veers
and wheels, a fleet
and schooling swarm
in synchronous alarm,
a bloom radiating
in ribbons, in sheets,
in waterfall,
a murmuration
of birds
that turns
liquid in air,
that whooshes
like waves
on the shore,
or the breath
of a great
seething prayer.