Day Labor by Jim Shugrue

Day Labor

At an age when friends desert you

going over to the dead, what is there to do?

Sit in your house surrounded by old books

while the senile republic reminds you

there are worse things than death.

Wood smoke drifts over the winter landscape,

picnic tables covered in blue plastic tarps, who knows

what the neighbors are thinking? Who knows who's harmless,

who armed to the teeth plotting revenge? I watch the birds

at the feeder for hours at a time. Their appetites,


their rivalries. How they survive the winter here.
Nervous, contemplative, a little, it seems, confused,
but eating, living, being the one thought they have.
And I'm somewhat less than them, though I too serve
to fill the cylinder with seeds.



-from the chapbook, "Floating Verses," published by barebone books

http://www.poetry.us.com/jimshugrue.html