This week’s poem offers a hopeful view of our world by considering how birds deal with borders, trade agreements and other such rules that human create.
Dennis Camire lives in an A-frame in West Paris and teaches writing at Central Maine Community College and the University of Maine at Augusta. His poems have appeared in The Mid American Review, Poetry East Magazine, Spoon River Review, Off the Coast, Three Nations Anthology and other places.
Some Words on Birds and Borders
By Dennis Camire
Let’s praise all the world’s birds
Unconcerned with shots and passports
As they cross disputed borders
Then refuse to seek permission to
Touch down on the river’s moonlit landing strip.
And let’s sing of those crazy, Canada geese
Violating North American Trade agreements
As their bellies import unknown grains
And they don’t stop for the bomb
And pot sniffing dogs.
And see how a single winged being
Is yet to heed a “no fly zone”
Between this and that warring country
Where one general notes
“Soldiers turn into amateur birders
Watching over no man’s land”
Where grouse seek spouses
Along mine-laced gravel roads
And falcons let their young fly over
The steel trees of anti-aircraft artillery.
And Imagine, now,
The seeds of peace being sown
By the peacock caught
Between the troops’ cross-fire
Or by the mother cardinal nesting
In a tree overlooking the killing fields;
And you–birder of words–
Unsure if you can fly into
The altitudes of this altruism
Where flocks of hopeful thoughts
Are flushed from the single thrush
Admired through the sniper’s scope,
When did the b-52 of blue heron
Ever fail to drop, into the pond,
Anything but its body’s beautiful bomb?
Gibson Fay-LeBlanc is a poet who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. Poem copyright © 2017 Dennis Camire. It appears in “Combed by Crows” (Deerbrook Editions, 2017) and appears here by permission of the author. For an archive of all the poems that have appeared in this column, go to www.pressherald.com/tag/deep-water.
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