for the birds who went south last winter

Bah, still cannot hear your recording of it, so I can but comment upon the content.

I am hoarding as much light as possible
before the days get too short and I am at a loss
for happiness.

This could have been very melodramatic, even if you'd extended it to a quatrain, it would have been molasses, but as it is, kind of reflecting upon haiku/senryu form, it has an lightness, it's understated, simple, lyrical. Your pastoral qualities serve you well. I like the elements of play and necessity here, the light and the hoarding, for indeed happiness is more important than food, and if not happiness then light, then the things that induce some little peace in us. Your structure is good, I'm not one for punctuation, so I don't know, ask Amelia. The only mistake I could find here was the misspelling of hoarding. No, I don't know what happened to the real Kit. Robert Frost, Dylan Thomas, they have their parts in this, but tell me have you read "Snake" by DH Lawrence?

I am going a hundred miles
outside the city to cut a trail through the bruised
apples. So much of the heart is road, most of it

This wasn't so finely done as the first, but you're reaching into more rich imagery so it affords more messiness, more reality, and the cutting a trail through the bruised apples, that is sublime. Again, you've got the physical necessity and then the abstract, teasing them out separately. "most of it" disarms that grandeur of the metaphor which serves your tone very well, it's lovely. There is something akin to folk lyrics, actually, this would make quite a good song. There's that kind of humility and sense of space, of the dense meaning in simple action. But again, nothing terrible to comment on. **growls**

in need of work. I am going to spend the whole
afternoon in the orchard, calling each tree
a tombstone, saying a prayer

Why you cut it there, I'm not entirely sure, I suppose it works for the flow, I do want to hear how you spoke this. But your heart metaphor, again, is stunning, so you can do any little thing you want to your reader. The future tense worked particularly well in this stanza, this nearly stolid stoic planning, this restraint. This is grief in logical terms, and echoed well in your setting. This is the ritual of being human, in some way.

for the birds who went south last winter
and never came back. I am dreaming
of old lovers, I am trying to sing.

I'm glad that you chose this line as your title, it suits it perfectly. Almost stark, bare image there, endearingly existential observation, don't change anything. Nothing. the end of the second line here and the third line, I didn't quite like as much, they drop back into the emotive, where you left the present tense, so, actually I take that back, that is good, there was just something- ah, never mind, it works as it is, it's brilliant.

This is something of beauty, and for this illusive hope that almost comes upon the edge of your tongue in it, that makes it the more heartbreaking. You are rare, and most precious.

Enslaved,
Kit.