Evergreen

A poem about spring in the country

We moved to the country when our son was almost four years old, our daughter just shy of one year. One morning, just a week or two after we’d arrived, our son had finished his oatmeal and was looking out the sliding glass door at the back of the house. A strip of woods stood between us and a small farm, just visible when the leaves came down in the fall, but hidden from us all summer.

He called to us, “There’s an animal out here!” My husband and I exchanged glances and smiles. We both assumed it was a red squirrel, or a chipmunk, or something equally mundane, but new to our boy raised thus far in the city.

But when we looked we saw a good-sized red fox, a very healthy, seemingly well-fed red fox with a shiny coat and a bushy tail, gleefully tossing a big black hen into the air with a twist of its head and catching it again before it hit the ground. The fox was most definitely playing with its food.

We stood there a moment, trying gauge how our son would react. Finally he said, “I don’t think the chicken likes that.” To which I replied, “I think the chicken is already dead, honey. It doesn’t mind anymore.”

“That’s sad, “ he said.

“Sad for the hen,” I agreed, “but the fox is happy.” He gave me a thoughtful look and I went on. “Baby, nobody is making that fox a bowl of oatmeal every morning. It has to catch its own breakfast.”

He stood there watching for a few more moments, and then nodded his head. We watched as the fox trotted across the backyard, the hen’s neck clamped in its jaws, and disappeared into the tall grass of the meadow.

That was the first of many hard lessons for the kids and us that came with country life. And that phrase, “nobody is making that [fill in the blank] a bowl of oatmeal in the morning,” was used over and over again. The kids got good at feeling sad for the animal who had become food, but not begrudging the predator its meal. An early and important lesson in how more than one thing can be true at the same time.

Spring always felt like a particularly fraught time in our yard. All that new life, much of it doomed. Today’s poem is about that sense of wonder mixed with grief that I always felt as I watched nests built and destroyed, saw frogs eaten by herons, and heard the riotous celebration of a pack of coyotes after a successful hunt. Tennyson said nature is “red in tooth and claw,“ and he wasn’t wrong. But I’m glad our kids had a front row seat to it all, the happy and the sad. It made them resilient realists, without dulling their sense of empathy.

This poem started life as part of the February Poetry Adventure. Many thanks to

Petra Hernandez

for the prompt that inspired it.

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Evergreen

Inside the Norway spruce
we found a robin’s nest,
four perfect eggs
of the very best blue

We would lift you up
to peer inside 
when we knew 
the parents were away

Soon we learned
what a miracle it was
that these eggs hatched,
that these birds fledged,

when the hawk raided
the mockingbird nest
and the snake got into
the bluebird box

Tiny turkeys, little balls 
of fluff, toddled after their 
mother in the backyard, one 
fewer than the day before

A nest full of house finch 
eggs dashed in the driveway,
shells shattered and yolk baking 
in the sun, a bluejay pecking at it all

As we guided you through springtime
we couldn’t help but meet death
along the way, and we came to see it
as a season of grief as well as life

So precarious were these new
beginnings, we grew almost afraid
of showing you another nest, 
dreading one more loss

But the robins in their evergreen fortress 
were spared. Do you remember how 
we watched with a sigh as they flew away,
and waved until they disappeared?

It’s May now and National Poetry Month is over. But the page with all the NaPoWriMo prompts will always be available if you’re in need of a bit of inspiration.

Happy Reading and Writing, Everyone! Thanks for being here.