Contributor: Tikvah Feinstein

- -
The sparrows are back, relentless as wild grapes.
I hear his chirps, he demands that I do, as he balances
on the cable wire A chirp, chirp, chirping
loud his announcement, while she inspects the nest
just inside my porch roof, under the gable’s edge.

She steps inside, slips her body through the opening,
there’s just enough space - his doing, rather undoing,
since two years before I had tried to close
the opening with tar - after the birds had left
for winter, of course. Nearby I placed a birdhouse.
He was furious on return that next spring, and spent
days peck, peck, pecking an opening in the still pliable tar.

Just over the wire fence, on the slippery birdbath, she
and a young one, tenuous, want to take sips, but are shy,
when he flies over to perch between us. I know him by the
brown shield on his chest. He motions; under his guard
beaks dip to sip. Then the three take off in separate flights
join together on the roof. My roof, theirs.

We exist, summers, the terrier barks away strangers,
the sparrows, and I, in some kind of community of trust and
rituals. Of long, steamy days, and cool moonlit evenings.
I grow flowers, berries and vegetables, ignore their droppings,
laugh at bird love antics, sweep up the broken egg shells,
and adore the babies, their first clumsy wing flapping,
cautious flights. Soon, they and their young are gone.

My bird neighbors, summer guests become a memory among
sunflowers bouncing in sudden rains, dew crystals, gleaming
wild grapes, dusk in the glow of a purple sunset.


- - -
Tikvah Feinstein,editor of Taproot Literary Review for 25 editions, is author of three books and is widely published for poetry and short fiction.