Bird Shit on Leaves

By Mark Grinyer

The white-speckled green
of bird-shit on leaves
painted through weeks
of days without rain
marks favored platforms
under canopies of trees
where hawks cannot spy them
but where they can see
the movements of voters
through wind-gusts and rain
that soak these havens
and wash shit away
fertilizing forests with
generations of sleaze
enduring the protection
of dissembling days
providing the illusion
of unfettered peace
as finches fight sparrows
for disappearing seeds
digesting rough diets,
attempting to breed
here where I’m watching
birds shit on leaves
avoiding the noise
of some politician’s screed.

Mark Grinyer spent most of his childhood and youth following his father, a U.S. Air Force officer, to many different stations in the United States and overseas, before settling in Riverside, California. Mark went to college at the University of California, Riverside, where he began writing and publishing poetry. After being drafted into the Army in 1969, he returned to the University for graduate school. and received a PhD in English and American Literature. He wrote his dissertation on the poetry of William Carlos William and developed a particular interest in the roles of poetry and poets in modern society, and in the use of scientific and natural scenes or images as vehicles for understanding our place in the modern world. He spent the next 25 years working as a technical editor and proposal specialist in the aerospace industry. After retiring in 2006, he returned to teaching for a few years at California State University, Fullerton, where he continued with his poetry.

Photo credit: Everjean via a Creative Commons license.