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Elizabeth Madox Roberts
The woodpecker pecked out a little round hole
And made him a house in the telephone pole.
One day when I watched he poked out his head,
And he had on a hood and a collar of red.
When the streams of rain pour out of the sky,
And the sparkles of lightning go flashing by,
And the big, big wheels of thunder roll,
He can snuggle back in the telephone pole.
a woodpecker’s
speckled woods
weathering novemberly
down to embers
in the soothills
of the alleghenies
where victorians went
on elegant excursions
railroad logging a hundred
summers in a day
now free to go
fluttering
muttering off
earthward
warm
worm
a self-closing gate
among 200-year-old oaks
its rusty note
smothered in leaf duff
the violet’s self-fertilized
alter ego
ah to be
both dapper and invisible
striped wintergreen
ignored by
a pileated woodpecker
the dust from her drill
It’s the first petrichor of spring—
that musk the soil gives off after rain,
strongest when long delayed.
So who wouldn’t choose
a day like today for dancing?
Side by side, cackling softly,
the two pileated woodpeckers
hitch their way down a tall locust tree
all the way to the ground.
If it calls often,
it’s a hairy woodpecker,
less often: a downy,
never: an ivory-billed.
Each year the ground grows simpler
and the sky more complex.
Right over there,
in a hollow locust tree,
a hive of wild bees used to sleep.
High winds. I press an ear
to the trunk of a ridge-top oak
and hear nothing but wind.
My footprints in the snow
are more than erased;
they’re raised up, scattered like ashes.
The woodpecker must hear any sound
an oak can make.
It taps out a response.
blue winter sky
the little peck holes
up a pine tree
When April scatters coins of primrose gold
Among the copper leaves in thickets old,
And singing skylarks from the meadows rise,
To twinkle like black stars in sunny skies ;
When I can hear the small woodpecker ring
Time on a tree for all the birds that sing ;
And hear the pleasant cuckoo, loud and long —
The simple bird that thinks two notes a song ;
When I can hear the woodland brook, that could
Not drown a babe, with all his threatening mood;
Upon whose banks the violets make their home,
And let a few small strawberry blossoms come :
When I go forth on such a pleasant day,
One breath outdoors takes all my care away ;
It goes like heavy smoke, when flames take hold