Myrtle Warblers

Athens, Georgia
March 8, 2018

You may call them butter butts
(they are not diminished). Perhaps
you caught an idle glimpse

looking out from the kitchen sink
as the spring wave worked north.
They go about their business

skimming insects from the surfaces
of rivers, gleaning from leaves,
stealing from spiderwebs,

warbling the northern woods in summer.
They flit through conifer stands
flashing butter yellow rump,

then flood the continent in fall
from the great blue-green spruce
down ancestral flyways.

In the dearth of winter they settle
into Southern scrub, Eastern woods,
and mountain hollows

to digest the wax from myrtle berries.
Someone must – it’s a niche,
and who’s to say a minor role?

For there is a final dignity to it all,
a calling in the cogs and cycles,
the bones and blood of Gaia.

Image by D. Gordon E. Robertson -
Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8100364