Jennifer Stewart Miller

To the Young Baltimore Oriole

You should have been sipping nectar all winter
in some green, voluptuous place far south of here.
But October turned to November turned to December,
and the feeder I took down in late August, I put back up
for you. Every icy, wind-bashed day and night,
I worried—hasn’t it been that kind of a winter?
Hasn’t the wind seethed and battered away at us?
Snow or sleet slanting down, that howling.
So cold out there—where do you shelter?
In the nest you were born in? Some tattered thicket?
There’s so little I can do to protect you.
Or my grown children. Or other humans,
or my own country. Each morning when I see you
on the neon orange feeder—there’s my girl!  Relief,
as sweet as the Stop & Shop grape jam I’ve fed you,
which somehow never freezes. From the warm
kitchen, visitors look out the picture window
at your hungry little perfection—the bird book
comes out, the binoculars, a lightness.
Winter’s end now. But what if, when the others
return in May, you find a mate, build a nest, raise
your young. What if, come fall, none of you fly south?
What if I’m not here? Should I have let you starve?
Maybe I have it wrong, and it’s nothing to do with me
and my grape jam. Maybe it was always in you.
On the bitterest days, the way you puff out
your orange breast, double in size—

Gull and Mollusk

Again the gull runs a few steps
down the stony beach, launches 

into the wind—surging up
fifteen or eighteen feet, 

another time more like twenty-five.
And the bird is blown back,

drops the dark object
clutched in its beak.

Windblown too, the hard thing
falls at an angle, strikes the stones. 

Again, the gull finds it
and flies back up. I count the tries—

each effort to lift off,
then the earth’s blow.

The inlet’s waves bare their teeth,
seethe to shore. The grasses tremble, 

shark-colored clouds cruise the sky.

Twenty-five times
the gull tried.

The mollusk’s shell
twenty-four times held.

Back to Issue XIV…