First Sugar Moon of the Pandemic

Photo by Birmingham Museums Trust on Unsplash

Chickweed and bird’s eye speedwell recede, 
the tiny white teeth and blue water 
of their flowers 
giving way to hairy bittercress, purple dead-nettle. White
tufts flanked by dark javelins rise 
beside dragon heads. 

Maple sap drips from sapsucker holes, and the green troll-hair
of onion grass pocks the lawn. 

When they decide it’s spring, it’s spring. Calendar be damned. 

Now, year-old sage will sprout leaves 
from root crowns, and soon the great honeysuckle bush
will crack its green firework. 

Two things I know: a honeybee tumbles 
over the rosemary bush; last year I raised one 
monarch butterfly. 

Yonder, 
a robin has been trying for ten minutes 
to break a beakful of shredded polypropylene twine
from its tangle 
on a tomato cage.

Agricultural twine now appears in the nests 
of an increasing number of birds, who love it 
for its flexibility and strength, 
who often fly in search of it, whose feet 
it entangles, 
whose hatchlings it orphans. 
Even chicks get tangled, limbs becoming 
deformed. 

This is not a poem about survival.
The robin stops tugging 
and perches on the cage wire, 
preening. 

In a moment, I will go to the tangle 
and she will fly away, while I cut the white
threads from the wire, crushing them 
in my hand.

Anna Laura Reeve is a poet living and gardening in East Tennessee. She's working on her first poetry collection.

(c) 2021 Anna Laura Reeve