POETRY

Winner of the 2026 Auburn Witness Poetry Prize Honoring Jake Adam York

Spring

By Jed Myers     VOLUME 59 No. 3

Vertical Divider

Please no fog of season’s name
between the reeds and me—no

idea of green to dull the brilliant
blades. Let’s not say pond

but watch—the water thrills
as wind roughs up its skin.

May these words dissolve soon
as they find you in this moment

turtles bask anonymous
on that drift-log, and listen—

blossom-chimes we’ll call red-
flowering currant if we must—

light-song beyond tympanic,
gleam ringing off the leaves

and petals we need not tell
what kind. Why spell out

cottonwood or poplar ? I wish
to not think spring—not cast

a one-word net on splashing
fish and Putin’s tank-tread prints

on Ukraine’s muddy thaw. Yes
the planet does now tip

its shrunken white hat to the sun,
and while the beaches swarm,

Sudan’s and Gaza’s breast milk’s
gone. . . . How name these days

my daughter came, my father left,
and in the glow that lingered

on the path last dusk, above me
on a low branch in silhouette

a hawk made supper of a nest—
the resident song sparrow strafe-

harassed that stolid guest
whose beak thrashed the wreath.

Seeing its house and young lost,
the sparrow’s anguished song

sounded just like its hope’s,
the same I’ve heard all spring.

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JED MYERS is the author of four books of poetry—his most recent, Can’t Be Far (MoonPath Press, 2026), was a finalist for the Sally Albiso Award. His prior collections are Learning to Hold (2024, winner of the Wandering Aengus Press Editors’ Award), The Marriage of Space and Time (MoonPath Press, 2019), Watching the Perseids (2014, winner of the Sacramento Poetry Center Book Award), and six chapbooks. Recent honors include prizes from Columbia Journal, Common Ground Review, and the Skagit River Poetry Foundation. His poems have appeared in Rattle, RHINO, Poetry Northwest, Southern Indiana Review, Southeast Review, The Greensboro Review, and other journals and anthologies. Myers lives in Seattle, where he’s Editor of the journal Bracken.


VOLUME 59 No. 3