Risa Bear’s “It Is Quiet Out There” begins with an absence so pervasive that it becomes the poem’s real subject. A woman gathers her “hat, stick and forage bag,” slips pruners into it, steps into green clogs, and sets out to listen for birdsong under brush piles and in cottonwoods. Almost immediately the expected music is missing: “They have flown, / The silence tells her; those that haven’t died.” From that tension between the ordinary ritual of foraging and the eerie hush around it, the poem turns an afternoon walk into an inquiry about what has gone wrong, ending with the quiet accusation: “War has been declared. A war on song.”
The poem’s construction mirrors the speaker’s wandering attention. It is free verse, with no fixed rhyme scheme or meter, but its rhythm comes from carefully broken lines and the pull of enjambment. “She / Takes her hat,” “feeling / Quite exurban-agrarian,” and “her / Ears pricked” keep the reader moving as the speaker moves, pausing at the edges of thought. Rhyme is mostly absent; where sounds recur—“green clogs,” “brush piles,” “pockets up”—they are consonantal and soft, as if the poem itself is too subdued to sing. This muted music suits a landscape that is also in-between: roadside ditches, brush piles, cottonwoods, neither fully rural nor fully suburban. The speaker’s self-description as “exurban-agrarian” is humorous and precise—she is trying to live a small land-based life while cars pass and neighbors drive.
Much of the poem’s power comes from its precise attention to plants. The speaker “pockets up her apples, rose hips, leaves / That now are turning away from green,” and the list of foraged names—cat’s ear, high mallow, chicory, plantain, sow thistle—grounds the poem in the unglamorous flora of disturbed ground. Naming them is a form of care, a way of noticing life even as the larger soundscape empties. “Turning away from green” signals autumn and, more darkly, a world turning from vitality. Even while gathering, the speaker keeps her “ears pricked for passing flights of geese,” as if hoping that migration might restore some sense of natural rhythm.
The poem’s final movement is speculative and troubling. “Really, thinks she to herself, there ought / Even now to be more birds.” The colloquial aside sounds like a neighbor talking over a fence, which makes the next thought more chilling. She considers feral cats and dismisses them, then asks, “Or could it be the sprays?” That single word shifts the poem from personal observation to systemic cause—pesticides, herbicides, the chemical background of modern land use. The speaker does not claim certainty, and that uncertainty is part of the poem’s honesty. Earlier she waves to cars, “Understanding her neighbors have to drive,” so she does not present herself as guiltless. But the final line turns anxiety into metaphor: “She supposes / War has been declared. A war on song.” The word “supposes” keeps it tentative, yet the image is forceful. Birdsong becomes “song” broadly—music, poetry, liveliness itself—and its disappearance is framed as an act of war.
What makes the poem significant is its refusal to shout. It works by accumulation of small observations, and its quietness is exactly its subject. The title’s statement, “It Is Quiet Out There,” first sounds peaceful. By the end, the same quiet sounds like evidence of violence. The poem asks readers to attend to what is absent, not only what is visible. It finds ecological grief in a roadside ditch and a forage bag, suggesting that the loss of birdsong is not a natural mystery but a consequence—possibly deliberate, certainly human. The final metaphor lingers because the quiet out there is not rest, but aftermath.