Ellen Mass sends four for her leave-taking gift to us

 

Picture of Ellen large enough to see her, taken last year when we met downstairs.

The Reservation

We search and steward this place

With surprising green and blue resources

With feelings of human-animal kin,

Both of us, urban and threatened

A wild place, filled with tiny warblers in spring and fall

Palm, yellow rump, blue black, green, chestnut- sided, parula*,

They bless us against fixation, fleeting and moving

to seasonal habitat far away

This urban respite becomes open business season for deadly intrusion

With warblers and kindred species soon wasted by asphalt soils.

                                                                      

Synesthesia

Magnetic relations between 2 talkers

Obsessed with repartee’, mundane or not

Minimize all reality around

Absenting the sweet spirits of other souls

Touting kindness and gentility

between their tiny connecting thread of understanding

With feathered  heads bobbing above water

Nature disdains this mindless chatter

I see timidity floating quietly

The animal’s humility submerged

Alternatively, I see stars brighten

And the two drowning chatterers

calling over that deep water for survival.

Kingfisher

Female with chestnut belt

During 40 mph into the River

With ta-ta-ta-ta-ta

Almost invisible to ragged crested,

Blue as miniature jay,

At home in the dirt mound we dug

for her ease and breeding.

Labored with love the entry and exit doors

That business volunteers created

Little did they sense their shoveling was mere

Community service

For this miraculous marathon flyer

Dangerous Feeder

Watching feeder-- Comes purple finch,

Red as they come,

Jittery, paranoid as human suspicion

On the alert

Cooperative and fussy amongst peers

Long neck bobber

One by one seed from my feeder

Long surveillance

of my busy landscape

Danger may be anywhere.

Then on to next feeder

Crafty spotted one.  She overlooks nothing.