Poem: What survives

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Photo 'lead type' from jm3 at flickr
via Creative Commons license

Our children, and subsequent children, will know little about the printing press, movable type, and typesetting, except from history books and very cool art departments where book printing continues as an art form. My Uncle Jimmie had his own printing press and these tiny letters and symbols of different fonts. He had a nice little private printing business and printed our wedding invitations thirty-three years ago. I got to thinking about the loss of this painstaking "black art" sometime late afternoon yesterday, when I looked out the deck window and noticed that all the birds were gone. There had been hundreds of them on top of the bird seed on the ground all day. It got me thinking about . . .

What survives

Not a one is left
on the basin of ground

under the spruce tree
where sunflower seeds cover
snow

like black letters
on a white page

And evening draws down
its fade --

sky, rooftops and ground
the same shade of white-gray

The bamboo leaves
are still

and graceful,
like vintage wallpaper

A hundred birds
scavenged
all the day,

tirelessly
picking up and
rearranging black seeds

like typesetters preparing
the evening paper

for hours,
in a rush,

furiously, against
a cold night

as if their livelihood depended on it
as if a deadline approached

And where are they now
gone from this silent basin

Perched on the bars
of pine trees

inside a thick atmosphere
of huddling?

Their black claw feet
tapping each other,

knocking snow
from the boughs

their gullets
transforming seeds

into words
inside them

like

y e s t e r d a y

and
t o m o r r o w

and
n o w

Listen to a podcast of this poem here.

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