Flurries of sparrows come and go, alarmed by things invisible to us. Bold chickadees do not budge for humans. Big and little woodpeckers, sated with insects, look for seeds to cleanse their palates. Nutty nuthatch eats upside down. Tufted titmouse, on the ground. Purple finch has no purple. Yellow finch looks like an escaped canary. The redbirds wait till the riffraff are gone, and dine at a civilized hour. All day long, squirrels squabble with the birds, like children with their siblings.
But at night the scene goes full mammal. The teenagers arrive. First the coons, the rockstars who trash the place, shake the feeder down and break it open. Then the skunk who digs up the ground. Having different diets, they coexist like separate high-school cliques. Last of all Blossom the Possum, nature’s little hoover, cleans it all up for the next morning, like the school janitor after the prom.
Associate professor of writing at MSU, Cheryl Caesar spent 25 years living in Paris, Tuscany and the Republic of Ireland. She gives readings locally of her protest poetry, and serves on the board of the Lansing Poetry Club. Last year she won third prize in the Singapore Unbound international poetry contest for a poem on climate change, and this March she won the “no age limit” scholarship to the Fine Arts Writing Center Social Justice workshop in Provincetown MA offered by Indolent Books, publisher of the protest poetry blog What Rough Beast.
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