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Nesting Boxes

Published onDec 09, 2024
Nesting Boxes
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Nesting Boxes 

"The feeling heart does not tire of carrying ballast."  – Jane Hirshfield

She knows where
it's legal to bury 
the ashes of a human being. 
Deep in woods, 
she hides her old husband 
under land for which 
he fought a fire 
and won. Wilderness 
has attempted a comeback 
here, pine again, 
almost waist high. 
She builds nesting boxes –
the special kind for bluebirds – 
and hangs them in the sun 
to lose the smell of nails. 
In time, she sets them 
among the high spruce
that surrounds 
saplings in the process
of reclaiming burned space
and his unmarked grave. 
The birds arrive. 
Every year, a shy 
blue circle raises 
its generation of song. 
She keeps track of the woodpecker –
trouble in a red hat – 
lured to the area by 
a subdivision's fresh supply
of shingled roofs.
Sure enough,
woodpecker populations
increase,
while gradually
a bluebird region of sky
begins giving up its music.
She baits traps 
with suet and chauffeurs
sounds of hammering
to faraway trees 
infested with a famous beetle.
She guards her nesting boxes 
and the melodies native 
to my uncle's place.
She shakes her white head,
asking what we're all coming to –
though she knows –
and turns with her world
which goes around 
the other way.

Vol. 41, no. 1, 2012

Marsha Truman Cooper was awarded first prize in the New Letters Literary Awards Competition for poetry, received the Bernice Slote Poetry award, and won publication for two poetry chapbooks in blind competitions. “Nesting Boxes” celebrates her great aunt who died in the late 1990s at a ripe old age doing marvelous things right up to the end. She currently studies botanical art full time with two mentors in the UK.

 

 

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