DAYLIGHT

by Colin Bailes 

Smoke uncoils from my neighbor’s
chimney as I watch from behind clouded windows. 

New birds at the feeder
whose names I must learn— 

dark-eyed junco, northern flicker,
common yellowthroat. So often daylight dissolves

everything I know of life on earth.
So often I must thread the remaining pieces—

the way morning slowly stitches
itself back together behind power lines.

How briefly the daffodils lasted this year—

Still, from the warren
they’ve burrowed beneath the shed, the rabbits return—

their eyes like small obsidian planets.

Colin Bailes holds an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University, where he served as the 2020–2021 Levis Reading Prize Fellow and was awarded the Catherine and Joan Byrne Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets. A National Poetry Series finalist, his poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Best New Poets, Blackbird, The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, The Massachusetts Review, Narrative Magazine, and Nashville Review, among other journals. He lives and teaches in Richmond, Virginia.