Turbula
Online since August 2002
Poetry
 
 

Gone Home for the Summer


"I'm a Marketing Communications Manager for a tiny division of a gigantic company, and man, going into an office every day can be excruciating. I should've stayed on Northfield Avenue instead where I belong and learned to fix cars like my Daddy did."


Looking out from a third-floor student room
over the plain cement balcony,
wires hanging down, birdfeeder poised in the middle,
flowerpot with a dried dead flower,
(geranium perhaps) overlooking
a cluttered, dusty driveway,
rusted, dented green dumpster overflowing
from the students all having left campus
with its infernal studying,
gone back home for the summer.
The birds seem gone too, strange,
the clear plastic birdfeeder full still,
then one lone sparrow glides in like a wounded helicopter
clutches to the side edge of the cement balcony,
peers over at the seed, wondering
about it, is it safe, while waiting
for the long, dry summer to end,
for life beginning again, the campus filling up
with the return of the fall.
Suddenly a cardinal appears
like a red devil popping from the ether,
at the birdfeeder, hungry and pecking
and twittering and alive
and the summer's beginning
doesn't seem so bad after all.

Published August 2007

 
 


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