Dendroica coronata
Yellow-rumped warbler
Claire Skinner
The Warbler
The yellow blaze of the wood warbler
begins to glow on the highest branch:
she perches, uncovered, snatching every bug
that floats by in the sunbright, winter wind,
occasionally calling a husky chwit,
chwit, unafraid, for the most part, of hawks.
Rough weather, it appears,
only brightens her color. I’ve taken to praying
at night, not much,
a word or two mouthed upon the sleeping altar
of your back, to the wide desert sky,
to a thorny, quiet mesquite
that’s taken root inside the red abandon
of my heart.
Small, toothed leaves, fuzz
of flowers in April, green pods—hanging velvet—in June.
My mesquite, lean
and bare in December,
and the hardy Yellow-rumped atop,
long-tailed and rather large,
armed with a stout, dark bill,
undaunted by winter, bustling forward
even as her kin (Hooded, Hermit,
Black-throated Gray) flee farther south
to tender hills of oversized flowers.
~~~~~
Claire Skinner is a student at the University of Michigan MFA program. She enjoys rhyme, couplets, semi-colons, and the occasional cliché.