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The Bluebird

Alexander Posey

1873 –

1908

A winged bit of Indian sky
Strayed hither from its home on high.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on November 12, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.

Alexander Lawrence Posey, born August 3, 1873, was a Muskogee Creek poet, journalist, and humorist known for his poems and Fus Fixico letters.

About Alexander Posey

Themes

About this Poem

“The Bluebird” first appeared in Song of the Oktahutche: Collected Poems (University of Nebraska Press, 2008), a comprehensive anthology of the poetry of Alexander Posey. Unpublished at the time of Posey’s death, the poem was discovered in a manuscript collection of his work housed at the Thomas Gilcrease Institute of American History and Art in Tulsa, Oklahoma. In the introduction to the anthology, Matthew Wynn Sivils, Dean’s Professor in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Iowa State University, writes, “[Alexander Posey’s] nature poems―especially those devoted to birds and the ubiquitous Oktahutche―repeatedly manage to call forth inventive lines and singing language that collectively represent a love letter written to the natural world as one would find it within the Muscogee nation. For example, Posey’s very brief poem ‘The Bluebird’ works precisely because of its brevity: its straightforward yet striking image and simple delivery portray an Indian Territory sky found only in Posey’s literary world. [. . .] The best of Posey’s nature poetry becomes a sort of Indian Territory pastoral that ranks with the best verse of that time.”

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More by this poet

Autumn

In the dreamy silence
Of the afternoon, a
Cloth of gold is woven
Over wood and prairie;
And the jaybird, newly
Fallen from the heaven,
Scatters cordial greetings,
And the air is filled with
Scarlet leaves, that, dropping,
Rise again, as ever,

Alexander Posey

1910

The Call of the Wild

I’m tired of the gloom

In a four-walled room;

Heart-weary, I sigh

For the open sky,

And the solitude

Of the greening wood;

Where the bluebirds call,

Alexander Posey

1910

The Dew and the Bird

There is more glory in a drop of dew,
    That shineth only for an hour,
Than there is in the pomp of earth’s great Kings
    Within the noonday of their power.

There is more sweetness in a single strain
    That falleth from a wild bird’s throat,
At random in the lonely forest’s depths,
    Than there’s in all the songs that bards e’er wrote.

Yet men, for aye, rememb’ring Caesar’s name,
    Forget the glory in the dew,
And, praising Homer’s epic, let the lark’s
    Song fall unheeded from the blue.

Alexander Posey

2018

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The Bluebird

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