Poetry Sunday: For the Birds by John Shoptaw

I've been spending quite a bit of time observing birds recently. The birds are always there when I am out and about in my yard and it is comforting to watch them going about their normal lives without regard to our human concerns.

Apparently, John Shoptaw has been watching the birds, too, and judging by his poem, I would say he has a considerable understanding and empathy for them. He has empathy for the rare and the common birds, the resident birds and those passing through, including those escaping from wildfires. It pleases him to look after them all.

For the Birds

by John Shoptaw

For the abundant along with the rare birds at my feeder of late

For all kinds of birds I’ve lived with here are turning rarer

For the chestnut-backed chickadee, who carries her sunflower chip to the buckthorn to dine on between her toes

For the chickadees once came to my feeder in bunches

For the big round plain brown pair of California towhees who eat in parallel from the bird-crumb table

For though they crumb it clean without a glance or a cheep, I believe this remote old couple is as entwined as any two polarized photons

For the fearsome indigo Steller’s jays, black hooded and crested, Tapper and Sly, as I call them

For Tapper taps twice on an overhanging plum branch at two clucks from my tongue so I’ll know him

For Sly hangs back and shrieks me over and only shows himself after I place on the table their morning quincunx of unsalted peanuts

For he knows Tapper will quack to announce them and then squawk indignantly when he slyly swoops in

For the vast majority

For the dark-eyed juncos, the wide-eyed titmice, the narrow-eyed red-breasted nuthatches, who feed right-side up as they see it, the other birds upside down

For Audubon’s yellow-rumped, Wilson’s and Townsend’s warblers, nobody’s birds, who feed, drink and breed as they can

For the song sparrow’s song and the sparrow who exults in singing it

For a song—how long will that phrase mean what it means

For them all I refill the feeder, even this morning, when all blown-down things crackle underfoot and the Diablo wind seems to growl diabolically and scrape from all corners at once against a sky the color of flint

For the lesser goldfinches, symbolically fierce, who part their beaks at any other kind who would peck a chip in their presence

For the pine siskins, their symbolic match, who used to expose their underwings back at them with its dreadful yellow stripe

For two years running, no siskins at the feeder

For the brown-crowned, as-yet-unkindled sparrows, wintering from Oregon or the Farallon Islands, I sing my two-note welcome, hel-low, pointless

For they won’t learn it with my face masked against wild smoke migrating from the north

For the species too little or big or otherwise unsuited for the feeder

For Anna’s hummingbirds, who love to suck on our pineapple sage

For the red-tailed hawk perched in the smoke-fogged redwood

For soon it’ll be pestered by a twister of crows cawing hawkawkawkawkaw

For a red-tailed hawk I mistook it—something larger, ruffled molten

For the golden eagle it turned out to be—weird—hunched in the chill

For another flew up out of thick air and followed it south out of eyeshot

For those two—not migrants—evacuees clasping their emotional baggage

For the birds, then, what have I to offer

For what kind of refuge is my catalog

For I can’t reckon how to make good their losses

For I meant not to make a life list I meant

For others to partake in my pleasure

For it pleases me to look after the birds