This week’s poem, by Richard Foerster, brings us into a curious scene between a bird, a dog and a speaker observing them. I love the exquisite detail with which the watcher describes these creatures, and how the poem ends with a quiet meditation on what binds all three of them, “sworn / conspirators in the same creation.”
Foerster has worked as a lexicographer, educational writer, typesetter, teacher and editor of the literary magazines Chelsea and Chautauqua Literary Journal. For the last 34 years, he has lived on the coast of southern Maine.
Vesper Sparrow
By Richard Foerster
Pooecetes gramineus
Clyde is old, he does not care
the sparrow—not a foot
from where his muzzle, flush
with the parched lawn, twitches
in faint awareness and snorts
up tiny clouds of dust—
is gleaning bristles of shed fur,
a whole sheaf now held
in her beak. Comical almost,
like a handlebar mustache,
tilting this way then that
as the bird eyes the ground,
intent, until full-burdened,
she wings off and dips behind
a knotted clump of grass,
only to return minutes later
and forage next among
the downy hairs between
Clyde’s shoulder blades.
The bird notes me noticing
but knows we three are sworn
conspirators in the same creation:
this business of quiet taking,
the measured weave, the fated cup
left on open ground, and the song
we’d have break toward evening.
Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “Vesper Sparrow,” copyright © 2019 by Richard Foerster, from “Boy on a Doorstep: New and Selected Poems” (Tiger Bark Press) appears by permission of the author.
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