Your Daily Poem

This site exists for one purpose only: to help dispel the ugly and absolutely untrue myth that poetry is boring. Granted, a lot of poetry is boring, but you won't find it here. At Your Daily Poem, you'll find poetry that is touching, funny, provocative, inspiring, uplifting, and surprising. It may punch you in the gut, it may bring tears to your eyes, it may make you laugh out loud, but it most assuredly will not bore you!

Poetry on YDP—by poets living and long dead, famous to completely unknown--is specially selected for accessibility and appeal. Thanks so much for visiting—and remember: a poem a day keeps the doldrums away!

It's a Seagull Morning on Lake Chatuge
by
Karen Paul Holmes

I wake to a duotone picture—
pink lake and clouds,
gray mountains, diving gulls.

Then sunshine reaches ’round Bell Mountain,
catches the birds, illuminates them bright white.
More seagulls than usual this morning,
delicate as tissues floating from the sky.

One comes close to my window,
rhythmic wings with black tips.
He dives toward his reflection,
an image so clear on still lake,
it looks like two birds will collide.

Their morning chores complete,
fifty or more flock harmoniously at the sandbar.
Yet on the water, they go solo.
Each glides alone, trailing a gleaming wake.

Gulls winter here.
Like all fleeting things, they’re special to me.
But, in this January of record lows,
why didn’t they venture farther south?

Maybe the birds come for the same reason I do:
to dance among mountains,
where melodies—migrated on lips and fiddles—
still hover, preserved for gull generations
and for those who join their ancestral reel
through crisp Appalachian air.
　

This poem first appeared in Echoes Across the Blue Ridge (Winding Path Publishing, 2010).
Used here with the author's permission.

Karen Paul Holmes won the 2023 Lascaux Poetry Prize and received a Special Mention in the 2024 Pushcart Prize Anthology. Her books are: No Such Thing as Distance (Terrapin, 2018) and Untying the Knot (Aldrich, 2014). Karen's poems have been featured on The Writer’s Almanac and The Slowdown, and have appeared in numerous literary journals. A freelance writer who also teaches adult creative writing at John C. Campbell Folk School and other venues and conferences, Karen founded and hosted Writers’ Night Out in the Blue Ridge Mountains for many years and has hosted the Side Door Poets in Atlanta for more than 13 years. Learn more about her at www.karenpaulholmes.com.

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Jo:
A beautiful poem,and space for the reader to journey to where you are-- to sit and watch the gulls so vivid, the scenery calm and lovely. Jo
Posted 01/11/2011 12:45 PM

dianapoet:
Beautiful images
Posted 01/10/2011 08:05 PM

Shelly:
Beautifully written. I can imagine the scene, sitting with a big cup of coffee and wearing a fluffy bathrobe. A divine way to start a day.
Posted 01/10/2011 03:57 PM

Andrea:
Beautiful. Vivid. I didn't know seagulls hang out at such places.
Posted 01/10/2011 02:17 PM

diana.anhalt:
Wonderful poem. So honest and straight-forward. Just like Karen. Diana Anhalt
Posted 01/10/2011 10:54 AM

Linda Lee (Konichek):
What a perfect poem of place; I feel as if I'd been there and can see and feel these beautiful images.
Posted 01/10/2011 10:41 AM

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