* Bad Bird Bandits

I had the great pleasure of an afternoon/evening at Fran K.'s last Sunday, a wonderful antidote to my utterly mundane urban existence, a place outside of town that reminded me of childhood summers at my grandma's in the small town of Ft. Pierre, SoDak, Grandma Mollie's old house a mere block away from a deliciously "uncivilized" slough and three blocks away from the Missouri River (sans tourist traps).

The human conversations were entertaining as well. But at one point, my wife told the story of Blue Jays robbing a House Finch nest on her front porch. And I felt half-brained & incomplete, in not being able to quote Robert Francis's moving retort of a poem, called "Blue Jay." So here it is [Quot. of the Day]:

So bandit-eyed, so undovelike a bird
to be my pastoral father's favorite—
skulker and blusterer
whose every arrival is a raid.

Love made the bird no gentler
nor him who loved less gentle.
Still, still the wild blue feather
brings my mild father.
    --Robert Francis

The subsequent conversation involved rationalizations regarding "nature's way," etc. (I even referred to Darwin myself, if I recall.) But I was too tongue-tied/brain-dead to bring up "intuition's way," my own identification with the vultures & corvids, etc., of our ecosphere. And so this poem.