Colin Bailes

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Colin Bailes

Harvest

 
Even if it’s not the same rabbit

we still call it our rabbit, the one who scrounges

each morning in the yard, preparing

for winter. There’s a sort of solace here—

in the sunlight gathering in the leaves of the sycamore,

the blue jays who visit the crepe myrtle at twilight,

the green stalks of sunflowers

sprouting beneath the bird feeder where seed

has fallen from the beaks of sparrows,

all that returns to us—

There is a secret—the story about death and the one

about gratitude, they are the same story.
 

Colin Bailes reads “Harvest”

 

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. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Blackbird, The Cortland Review, Missouri Review, Narrative, Raleigh Review, Subtropics, and wildness, among other journals. He lives in Gainesville, Florida, and teaches writing at Santa Fe College and Virginia Commonwealth University.