Gloria Monaghan is a Professor at Wentworth University in Boston, MA. She has published seven collections of poetry: Diary of Saint Marion, Lily Poetry Review, (2025), Cormorant on the Strand, Lily Poetry Review (2023), Hydrangea, Kelsay Press,(2020), Torero, Nixes Mate, (2020) False Spring, Adelaide Books, (2019), The Garden, Flutter Press (2015), and Flawed, Finishing Line Press (2011). Her poems have appeared in Mom Egg Review, Quartet and River Heron among others. She has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize, as well as the Massachusetts Book Award, the Griffin Prize, and nominated for the Sheila Margaret Motton Book Award from the New England Poetry Club. She is also a film maker.
Great Horned Owl
Under a foot of snow, a field mouse moves
driving home his dinner in the dark.
The Great Horned owl hears through one ear and forty seconds later the other ear,
more precise in his loneliness location of doom.
Ragged ended feathers ensure a silent departure, dive to catch something
sweet for once, something small satisfying and easy.
She could if pressed land a porcupine or seize down on a skunk,
but sometimes it is easier to take a buried mouse in your mouth
because like all others of her kind, she cannot see what is behind,
must listen for the wolf at the door.
Sunday In February Near Nauset
A clutch of chickens border the narrow road
their rooster waddles soft
ahead not concerned for their
feathered way.
The Rose Throated Grosbeak Has Emerged Glorified
A bird came and lighted on my fingers
(like George Sand in her garden at Nohant)
It followed me everywhere, and I felt like Saint Francis
an adobe Catholic with a scapular and saint cards in the kitchen-
alone in a desert house.
In noonday sun I put the geraniums out.
After a winter of privations, dark thoughts and impotence’s.
There they thrived for a day until the cold night curled their leaf wings,
so I pruned them off apologizing
to the hearty stem
for my foolishness in wanting the sun so much
to take me up into the sphere of glory and love.
The Phlox
Summer is late, my heart
Stanley Kunitz
All night the doves flew from their eves
wings hovering in air, blue and green and lighter blue to deeper green
sunlight under leaves.
The doves flew onto their perch and then came and sat down.
Together they formed a leisurely temporary plan
to nurse the phlox.
A Turmoil of Porpoise
A middle-aged woman got out of a yellow mustang with her daughter.
I gave her 70 dollars, I knew she wanted something.
She came at me in a relentless way.
(like the homeless woman shouting obscenities
at me earlier in the day from her sidewalk).
I went to Provincetown. It was raining. A teen couple
walked the stairs leading to the bay
where a porpoise was swimming.
Then another, then their children, a family of four.
I didn’t want to get involved, so I just said,
there is a problem.
It would be late that night before the marine mammal rescue workers
could helicopter the porpoises out the bay then the police showed up,
and one by one they evaporated into lotus flowers.
The Galway Review 