birds, tree trunks

One of my recurring themes is birds. In addition to the daily appearance of the song birds during the winter, I wait for the cedar waxwings, orioles and others to reappear in the spring. When I worked at the New England Quilt Museum, my commute on Route 495 through Massachusetts guaranteed sighting hawks nearly every day.

My January 17 entry was about a less spectacular, but a constant bird in NH - the nuthatch. They travel up and down tree trunks looking for food and they have interesting songs. I found a bird stamp - it looks nothing like a nuthatch - but I like its quirky attitude.
I glued strips of white on white printed parchment onto the card and stamped it with a walnut Distress Ink stain. The border is a rough impression of the bird's footprint drawn with a LePlume marker. I wrote the verse on white paper, cut it into strips and glued it on over the birds.

This entry works with its repetition, variation, and the art complements the text.

January 24th documents another ubiquitous, less cute, bird - the beautiful black crow. I used a Flair felt tip marker to draw the trees, wrote the verse on a scrap of black using a silver marker and also cut it into strips. The crow looks like a child's drawing of it in the sky. The frames emphasize the sense of vertical created by the hundreds of trees in the same forest I've written about before.

1/17 The lone nuthatch calls
over the blanket of white;
trunks divide the space.


1/24 A crow calls and soars.
Hundreds of tree trunks stand strong.
Morning's soft breeze blows.



I remember working with the syllables in "Morning's soft breeze blows."
I started with "breezes blow". Making it singular makes the count correct and it changes the sensation slightly.