Sparrows in the Garden

As light returns, in dozing green,
never a sparrow to be seen. 
Never in tangles of rusty ferns
nor hedges rich with pungent tannin
curled with smoke where bonfires burn
in dozing green, as light returns.

Outside the window, on fence and ledge,
some chase each other in the hedge,
or hide and seek in the curly willow.
Too small to see, they’re newly fledged;
an inconspicuous bird’s the sparrow
on fence and ledge, outside the window.

Kim M. Russell, 6th February 2025

Image by Jessica Moss on Unsplash

This month’s first dVerse Poets Pub Meeting the Bar is with Laura; it’s linked to a recent MTB with Björn, whose challenge was the Via Negativa poetry form. Laura says that, on coming across Averill Curdy’s ‘Sparrow Trapped in the Airport’, she was taken with how the first half of the poem is written in the same vein with ‘never’ rather than ‘not’ as the defining adverb.

Laura says that Curdy’s poem is “a wonderful description of the sparrow in both what it is not and what it is”. Like Laura, I have a soft spot for sparrows, we have lots in our garden, and I am a ‘Cockney sparrow’. I enjoyed ‘Vesper Sparrows’ by Deborah Digges as much ‘Sparrow Trapped in the Airport’.

Laura would like us to write in an invented stanzaic form created by Kathrine Sparrow, a variation of the Swap Quatrain, which was first prompted by Grace in 2022 namely the Sparrowlet. Sadly, I was away for that prompt. However, Laura has given us some poetry rules and examples.

Our poems should consist of any number of stanzas of six lines, with eight syllables per line, and an end rhyme scheme of BbabaA, often written in iambic tetrameter. Line one and line six of each stanza are written in two hemistichs, i.e. the line is split in two with commas, and the two halves of line one are inverted and repeated exactly as a refrain in line six.

28 thoughts on “Sparrows in the Garden”

  9. When we moved to Ireland, we were delighted by the familiarity of what we took to be somewhat fat Sparrows only to be put right by a twitcher friend who told us they were Bunting – noiw back in England we rejoice in sparrows once more as does your lovely poem Kim…

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