Diana Woodcock has two poems featured in this issue.
Photo © Lee Coursey
surround the dune shack,
each one claimed by a pair
of tree swallows busy
preening and mating,
setting up housekeeping,
sweeping insects from the air.
Song sparrows lustily sing from
tops of Salt-spray rose bushes.
Spring, and love is everywhere.
Breeding season underway,
best reason to be here late May.
Catbirds in plum thickets,
Redwings in bayberries,
Sand martins (Bank swallows)
in the Cape’s clay outcrops.
But all is not wine and roses—
interspersed between affection
much aggression. And when Red
fox comes at dusk, poking
his nose into bushes of Beach rose,
I hold my breath.
Diana Woodcock’s first full-length collection, Swaying on the Elephant’s Shoulders, won the 2010 Vernice Quebodeaux International Poetry Prize for Women. Her chapbooks include Desert Ecology: Lessons and Visions, Tamed by the Desert, In the Shade of the Sidra Tree, Mandala, and Travels of a Gwai Lo. Widely published in literary journals, her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net Award. Her second full-length collection, Under the Spell of a Persian Nightingale, will be published by WordTech Communications in 2015.
