Nesting by Robert Demaree

On our pond at Golden Pines
We check each day the shaded grove
Where the swans are nesting.
Shouldn’t be long, we say.
The male shares the duty,
Giving them a leg up
On other species we could name;
But then he wanders off.
Any day now, we remark.
But at the water’s edge:
Some eggs are smashed,
New ones in their place.
Still the mother patiently sits,
Reminding us of things
We wish we did not know.



Robert Demaree, NH, USA

Swans by Robert Demaree

The swans glide quietly by:
Do they know that turtles
Lurk below the rippled
Brown-green surface?
Does anyone know
What will happen next?
The bench by the pond,
It comes to me now,
Is where we would pause
To rest,
My mother and I,
Easing her wheelchair down the path,
On late spring afternoons at Golden Pines,
Twenty years ago,
Watching other swans.




Robert Demaree, USA

False Spring by Robert Demaree

Flowering fruit trees, cherries and pears,
After a false spring and late March frost:
Blossoms a dingy pink and white
Against a cold sky the color of dishwater
And woods still gray with winter.
I pass an abandoned convenience store,
With plywood windows like bandaged eyes,
Its solitary pump a sentinel
By the side of the road,
A sign, among many, of things,
Like some people’s marriages,
Which had offered promise
But didn’t work out.





Robert Demaree, NH, USA

The Adirondack Chair by Robert Demaree

Between the screened porch and the tool shed,
Back from the pond,
Sat my mother’s white Adirondack chair,
Where she would shell peas
Of a light New Hampshire afternoon 40 Julys ago.
You might call it a yard,
Except for grass there were ferns, maple seedlings, and
Sprouting amid the pine needles
A score of things I could not name.
In time the chair fell apart, began to rot,
Returning to the rocky soil whence it had come.
I could not let the space sit empty.
I got a white Adirondack chair of molded plastic
At the Walmart on the highway,
Near where the farm stand had been.




Robert Demaree, NC, USA

Grackles by Robert Demaree

Persuaded by a bogus theology,
Believing that God inhabits all things,
We have at length given in to the grackles.
No longer do I tap at the window
Lest they devour seed meant for the goldfinches,
Who can take care of themselves.
The grackles cast an oily, blue-black glance:
You put up bird feeders? We’re birds! Where’s the problem?
Sadly, I no longer argue.
With the squirrels, though, it’s a different matter



Robert Demaree, USA