Most nature poems begin with what is there. Mary F. C. Pratt's "Everglades #5: May" begins with what has left. "The birds have gone" is a flat announcement, and everything after it is shaped by that loss. The poem's central idea is that a place can be made vivid by absence. It never shows us a single bird, yet its first stanza is crowded with them. What remains in their place is heat, insects and reptile tracks: an older, harsher version of the landscape that carries on with no audience.
The opening stanza works by denial. Three "no" phrases in a row, "No golden-slippered egret, / no blue-eyed cormorant, / no wading stork", conjure the birds even as they take them away. The details are bright and tender: gold slippers that make the egret a dancer or a fairy-tale figure, blue eyes, and a stork "shielding / dark water with her wings," a gesture that feels almost maternal. The line break after "shielding" lets the word hang for a moment, as if the protection were still on offer. Then comes "Silence is absolute," a short sentence that shuts like a door. "Absolute" admits no exceptions.
In the second stanza the colour drains out. Gold and blue give way to mangroves that are "weary, dusty." Weary makes the trees human and tired, while "dusty" is a startling word to meet in a wetland. Judging by the imagery, and by the title's month, this is the dry end of a season, a landscape waiting for relief. The sound of the language turns unpleasant: "fetid pools" has hard, spitting consonants, and you can almost smell it. The only living things now are mosquitoes, and the verb chosen for them is "awaken," soft but faintly threatening. The swamp is not dead, just changing hands. The stanza ends on "Already the air / is thick with heat." That "Already" is the poem's quiet dread. If it is this oppressive now, what is still to come?
The third stanza moves the eye downward, from wings to air to mud. It opens with fragments pinned together by dashes: "Alligator spoor— / dinosaur track, / tail-drag—". The phrasing imitates the act of reading a trail, naming the mark once, then renaming it with something older. "Dinosaur" drags the scene back millions of years and reminds us that the Everglades is far older than any visitor and indifferent to them. The stanza holds off its verb until "marks," so the tracks seem to arrive before the grammar does.
Then the final simile: the tracks are "like the handwriting / of the blind." It is the poem's most surprising image, and it lands on the word "blind." A tail-drag through mud really is a kind of writing, but a wandering, unsteered one that no one has aimed. It also quietly answers the "blue-eyed" cormorant of the first stanza. The watchers have been replaced by something that cannot see, and the only script left on the page of the mud is one that nobody is there to read.
Formally, the poem is spare. It has three stanzas of six lines each, no rhyme, and short lines of only a few stresses, most of them closed off by full stops. The absence of rhyme suits the subject, because nothing chimes or echoes, just as nothing calls across the water. The tidy symmetry of the stanzas contrasts with the disorder they contain, so the poem feels controlled even as the landscape feels abandoned. Each stanza also narrows its focus, from birds to trees and insects to a single mark on the ground, like a camera slowly lowering.
The poem matters because it refuses to tell us how to feel. There is no lament and no promise that the birds will return. The number in the title suggests it belongs to a sequence, perhaps a year-long series, though that is only an inference from the heading. Even read alone, it shows how much a poem can do with restraint. By describing so exactly what is missing, Pratt makes us notice, and slightly mourn, the very things she says are not there.