This could always be the year
that turns out a little better,
the way quail vanished
from our yard then reappeared
a decade later, as if to prove change
is the only constant.
Last year, the un-neighborly old man
who ignored birds
but fed black flocks of feral cats
kept to his house and forgot
to put out his bowl.
The cats moved on.
Quail came back, that absent bowl
their small reprieve.
Silky feathers, silly crests,
each plume like a comma
to signify a soft pause,
and a continuing.
This poem first appeared in The Southern Review.
—
Susan Cohen is the author of Throat Singing (2012), A Different Wakeful Animal (2016), and Democracy of Fire (2022). She’s won the Terrain.org Annual Poetry Prize, Red Wheelbarrow Prize, and a Pushcart Prize Anthology Special Mention, among other honors. A former journalist and contributing writer for the Washington Post Magazine, she also received awards for best magazine article and best book from the National Association of Science Writers. She lives in Berkeley.
