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.