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

Reading on my Back Deck One Balmy Winter Day

I was interrupted by a sunset
of the understated kind –
ragged layers of gray overlain
by islands of off-white sky.

I don’t remember when,
but the wind had died. Not
a breath disturbed the bare tips
and twisted limbs of winter trees

while underneath, the whole
world shone. Nothing you
could capture by camera,
nothing to inspire a song.

A gentle river washed
the world with white noise,
a still spell soon cracked
by the call of a Carolina wren.

Listen, we live only moments,
and notice so few. Will you
close the book? Would you
shut down the screen? Look,

night sweeps from the east
beyond the speed of sound.
Gray deepens a shade. Dull
lace of red maple darkens.

The cream sky turns coral.
Shadows merge. Somehow
creation holds together. Even
in darkness the world glows.

Photo by Don Hunter