.
.
Readers can click to the next month at the conclusion of each poem. You can also go to each month by clicking on the link to the months here:
Jan/Feb/Mar/Apr/May/Jun/Jul/Aug/Sep/Oct/Nov/Dec/Intro
.
.
February, 2026
“Sonny in February”
by George Kalamaras
.
.
___
.
.
JPRoche, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Sonny Stitt, 1971
.
___
.
Sonny in February
……….for Sonny Stitt, February 2, 1924–July 22, 1982
February, and it’s snowing tonight, Sonny.
……………..The sound of your sax is blowing
inside me. Blowing bread where the seeds had been.
Each wind-drift of frozen February falling, filling
……………..the earth with the sweet hush of who and what
you are. Tonight, it’s you tracking me out West with “Cherokee”—
Hank Jones, Wendell Marshall, and Shadow Wilson
……………..yanking the light inside out. How’d you know
how cold I was and how much I needed your heat?
Now it’s “Body and Soul,” and there’s a weeping
……………..from deep inside the many weathers
wearing me down. January is two or three naps back,
and I’m sure March will come charging in with its bull-brash
……………..way. Somehow, you’ve always soothed my mood.
Made me feel whole again, even when I felt less than so,
perhaps because I always knew you’d bring me lilacs
……………..and love, birdsong and grass, playing
“It Might as Well Be Spring” as if blossoms were already
there beckoning me home. Wherever you are, I want to be,
……………..except in the land of the dead. Because dying
takes too much breath and stunts the possibilities of the sax.
But your wing-beat, Sonny, and your whooping crane way
……………..call for February migrations from the northern border
to the wallowing Texas swamps. Somehow, from your birth-month
you say I love you—to me, to the trees, to the world at large.
……………..And they bow to you, the willows and the oaks, sycamores
and elms, as if the wind inside your sax was turbulent
tornado green. And the earth was beginning to part. All this,
……………..come spring, yet here, in February. Now. In the ice
and drift, the snow and cold, the earth seeming as if it is closing
down around itself, around the sound of arctic aches—
……………..frozen, cold—but instead is opening with your heat
the snow-white bones of all we thought had been dead.
.
Listen to George Kalamaras read his poem
.
.
___
.
.
photo by Jim Whitcraft
George Kalamaras is former Poet Laureate of Indiana (2014– 2016) and Professor Emeritus at Purdue University Fort Wayne, where he taught for thirty-two years. He has published twenty-seven collections of poetry, eighteen full-length books and nine chapbooks. He recently won the 2024 Indiana Book Award for his book To Sleep in the Horse’s Belly: My Greek Poets and the Aegean Inside Me, a 300-page chronicle of George’s Greek ancestry—literary, artistic, and familial (Dos Madres Press, 2023).
.
.
Listen to the 1977 recording of Sonny Stitt performing the Rodgers and Hammerstein composition “It Might as Well Be Spring,” with Stitt (alto saxophone); Barry Harris (piano); Reggie Workman (bass); and Tony Williams (drums). [Universal Music Group]
.
.
Click here to read Erren Kelly’s poem for March
.
.
