The Tuesday Poem

The poem this week at Tuesday Poem is "A Jay Feather" by Seán Lysaght, a poet from Limerick, Ireland.

Therese Clear, a poet based in Seattle, is the editor of Tuesday Poem this week and she says of her choice:

"In poetry, I am especially interested in how a single poem intersects with life and poets off the page. When I queried Seán about featuring here, he sent me three poems for consideration, and "A Jay Feather" immediately leaped out as the obvious choice.

In my own work in glass art, we've been experimenting with new combinations of blue oil paints to apply to sand-blasted glass, with accompanying discussions on the nature of the colour blue, all the while entertained just outside the windows by the Stellar's jays on the suet feeder — jays whose ephemeral feather-presence leave suggestions of blue in their wake.

I've spent hours blending blues in an attempt to replicate the light that shimmers off a blue feather. Seán Lysaght's last three lines embody that quest, captures an entire world in "a fragment of that blue."

The synchronicity of receiving this poem with the ongoing blue-blending struck me as an instance of poetry slipping in its magic, without fanfare, unannounced. Poetry does that, doesn't it? Comes at us from a new angle of light, illuminates our consciousness, brushes a feather across our cheek and if we're lucky, we notice."