Morningside to Meadowlark – a poem by Robin Turner

Morningside to Meadowlark


to Tanglewood to Orchard. These streets
that want to be folded into poem.

They have kept me company, held me
when I did not want to be held.

This is friendship, wordless bond, steadfast
quiet to quiet. I ask the thick surround sound

of trees: Are you stuck here too? Rooted 
in spite of yourselves to inhospitable ground?

How to thrive anyhow, how to stay, take hold,
to leaf and branch for a season, make a home

for the birds and your own grounded doubt.
How to reach ever skyward—oh

stubborn longing!—to fly
to not fly at once.

Robin Turner has recent work in The Fourth River, Bracken Magazine, One Art, and Ethel, and in the Haunted anthology (Porkbelly Press). A longtime community teaching artist in Dallas, she is now living in the Pineywoods of rural East Texas for a spell. She works with teen writers online.