In them I heard the landscape open up—
The steep and narrow rockway between pine and bluff
Relax and stretch into a meadow
That gave space for the strangeness of their song,
Its electric buzz and bounce, as if
The humming power lines above
Had birthed them with the sky.
In fact, they’d flown from Argentina,
Every spring since long before
The power lines went up
So I should say the wires buzzed like bobolinks and not
The other way around.
But they sang with the energy of currents—
Watery ones too, up and around stones
Quick with snowmelt.
In their call, I heard the wideness of their world
And my daily walks passed through a foreign country
Until the fall.
Then their silence
Stranded me at home.
Image credit D. Gordon E. Robertson / CC BY-SA 3.0
(Un)Nature Poems 