I have been absent for months (again, as noted above), doing the nothings that I do, including employment again across the summery months (I and my fellow bug trappers were even designated, unnecessarily as it turned out, as “essential employees” during this disturbing and drastic pandemical year). My Beloved and I were restricted, thanks to notorious federal incompetence with the flourishing viral pestilence, to an autumnal vacation within the United States this year (let’s hope that changes with better administration next year, that and vaccines).
Regardless, what I want to do, rather than dwell in the sordid and seedy past today, is to look at a brighter trope. I sat to play with a “new” word-processor, Focused, at the computer and, seeking to write on another subject altogether, wound up, rather too quickly, with a new bit of verse:
Birdseed
I don’t much watch the birds I’ve allured
to our back yard (nor the front, neither)
with my half-dozen bird feeders
(and trinity of finch bags on that other side of the house)
fraught with Walmart’s
cheapest grain,
although they, the birds,
swarm
in their plural legions —
sunshine (like today), drizzle, downpour
or snow
(albeit most enthusiastically,
multitudinously, when the skies,
clear or gray,
are dry).
The squirrels, bastards,
take interest, too,
and for those arboreal vermin
I have my steel-pellet-propelling
handgun
with which, of course, I nearly always
miss.
Even so, erratically, periodically,
now and then and sometimes, too,
I gaze
mesmerized
from the upstairs, dining room,
down on the flittering, fleeting,
skittish hordes,
whom the merest breeze can all disrupt,
disturb and scatter
to the naked shrubs and bushes,
where they hide,
disguised like leaves,
(or else somehow translate themselves
through sunshine-shadow
portals
to alternative realities
unperceived by these too-mortal eyes).
And dutifully, for such am I,
this old man plods with ice-cream buckets full
through every weather and shade of dark,
replenishing the birds’ near-magical bounty.
