Redknots

Redknots 

The day our son is due is the very day
the redknots are meant to touch down
on their long haul 
from Chile to the Arctic Circle, 
where they'll nest on the tundra
within a few feet
of where they were hatched.
Forty or fifty thousand of them 
are meant to drop in along Delaware Bay. 

They time their arrival on these shores
to coincide with the horseshoe crabs
laying their eggs in the sand. 
Smallish birds to begin with,
the redknots have now lost half their weight.
Eating the eggs of the horseshoe crabs 
is what gives them the strength to go on,
forty or fifty thousand of them getting up all at once
as if for a rock concert encore. 

Vol. 31, no. 2, 2003

Originally published in Moy Sand and Gravel: Poems, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002. 

Paul Muldoon was born in Ireland in 1951 and moved to the United States in the mid 1980s after a successful career working for the BBC. He is the author of fifteen poetry collections, most recently Joy in Service on Rue Tagore, as well as smaller poetry collections, children’s books, criticisms, and radio and television drama. From 1999 to 2004 he was a Professor of Poetry at Oxford University and has taught at Princeton since 1987. He served as the poetry editor at The New Yorker from 2007 to 2017. He has received numerous awards, including the 2004 Shakespeare Prize, the 2017 Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, the 2018 Seamus Heaney Award for Arts & Letters, and the 2024 Premio di Poesia Sinestetica. He currently resides in New York with his family.