THE OLDEST WILD BIRD, WISDOM

by Pepper Trail

An albatross named Wisdom, the world’s oldest banded bird, has returned to an annual breeding ground in the Pacific Ocean and laid an egg—at the age of at least 69. The Laysan albatross was first fitted with a leg band in 1956 by biologists studying the life cycle of the birds. It meant that she could be identified among the three million individuals that nest at the Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge. —The Times (UK), December 5, 2020. Photo: Wisdom and her mate take turns for eight-hour shifts on the nest. Her return is considered a triumph for conservationists. Credit: WESSEX NEWS AGENCY

My father, gunner's mate, and your father, albatross

Somehow survived the Pacific War, and I imagine them

Inhabiting the same embattled sea, yours forever on the wing

Mine on endless watch, one day disbelieving the sight - 

No enemy, but that mythic bird, aloft

 

Postwar, your parents returned to bomb-cratered Midway

Where the stubble-headed sailors called them gooney birds

Where together they scratched a hollow between the runways

And from their ecstatic mating, their patient incubation

Hatched a chick, those sixty-nine years ago, you

 

Peacetime, safe again inside the continent, my father

Courted and married, and with his small bright bride

Produced me, firstborn, same year as you

My father's son, fated to be storm-tossed

Lover of birds, student of the albatross

 

As a youth, you were caught, handled, ringed

Given a number that began your history

Year by year, decade by decade, your life flew

Detached itself from the rest, soared above

Brought you to our notice, gave you a name

 

Wisdom, you have become a legend

But are not burdened, your endless voyaging

Simply your life, made up of days of wind

Content with the landscape of waves

Free upon your outstretched wings

 

Yet most years a moment comes that turns you back

Rearranging your feathers to seek the land

Where your mate waits, and the world waits

Today, with the news of your return, I bow my gray head

As you lift your wings and, once more, dance

 

Pepper Trail is a poet and naturalist based in Ashland, Oregon. His poetry has appeared in Rattle, Atlanta Review, Spillway, Kyoto Journal, Cascadia Review, and other publications, and has been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net awards. His collection Cascade-Siskiyou was a finalist for the 2016 Oregon Book Award in Poetry.

LINE OF POSITION

by Peleg Held

Bones discovered on a Pacific island in 1940 are "likely" to be those of famed pilot Amelia Earhart, according to a US peer reviewed science journal. —BBC, March 9, 2018

We are running on a line between
celestial navigation and dead reckoning
tempting the keepers of the crossings:
To live now into the skies.

Gas running low, unable to reach you yet
Electra's song still sings above the static,
the scraping tide where shells are emptied, torn
and wings churn back to ore--
identification in the debris field is a matter of scale.

We must be on you but we cannot see you.
As the sun-line sweeps towards our flight path
we grope for an island. A large ring
of white sand around a bright lagoon.

This is Emil Harte.

We lay out the bones of frigate birds, a testament
on sand. In our dreams Electra remains on the reef
we lean into the transmitter, spit into sunspot
and whisper our coordinates into the harmonic.
Give us a bearing—what is our position now?

I am an island where lost flyers make landfall,
where mercurial fingertips sign the freckled glass
buried in the strand. Here post-loss transmissions
still crackle the air, even as the rest
is carried over in the pincers of crabs.

We are listening.



Author’s Notes: Italicized bits are from the final transmissions of Amelia Earhart. Earhart submitted her poems to Poetry Magazine under the pseudyonym Emil Harte.


Peleg Held lives in Portland, Maine with his partner and his dog Emitt. There is also the semi-feral cat, Smudge. And a kid or two. pelegheld(at)gmail.com.

ABBOTTS LAGOON, PT. REYES NATIONAL SEASHORE

by Buff Whitman-Bradley

We lean our backs against
A bleached driftwood log
While we eat our simple lunch
And watch the Pacific
Approach and fall back
Approach and fall back
Like a shy teenager
Trying to work up the courage
To ask for a dance.
After our meal
We lie down on the sand
Our small packs pillowing our heads
Our sun hats covering our faces
And fall asleep
For a half-hour or so
Then awaken stiffly and reluctantly
Peering out from under our hat brims
At the glinting ocean,
Listening to the soft splashing
Of gently breaking waves.
As we yawn and stretch
Watching a plastic bottle
Wash up onto the beach
Our sleep-scattered thoughts
Slowly pull themselves together
And we feel the return of grief
For all that is being done
To our wracked and battered Earth,
Our fears for us all
Flooding our hearts once more.
We stand up, hoist our packs,
Brush off the sand,
Take a few deep breaths of sea air
For the road,
Then head out across dunes and pastures
Back to our car
And back to the global struggle
To repair a world out of whack.


Buff Whitman-Bradley's poetry has appeared in many print and online journals, including Atlanta Review, Bryant Literary Review, Concho River Review, Crannog, december, Hawai'i Review, Pinyon, Rockhurst Review, Solstice, Third Wednesdayand others. He has published several collections of poems, most recently, To Get Our Bearings in this Wheeling World. His interviews with soldiers who refused to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan became the book About Face: Military Resisters Turn Against War. He lives in northern California with his wife Cynthia.

MY FATHER WAS A WAR HERO IN HIS OWN WAY

by M.F. Nagel

Image source: http://www.angelfire.com/va2/worldwar2family/eddie2.html

My Father was a War Hero
In his own way;

He came home.
Never spoke of War;
But, I could see it in his face
In the way he smoked a cigarette
And stared across the Pacific;
On stormy days.

I heard they dragged him drafted from the docks
Where he welded blasted battleships
In antiquated scuba gear because he never feared the sea.

My Father was a War Hero
In his own way.

He returned
Dropped on Main Street.
Ordered to guard
Mr. and Mrs. Hiroshima; spies
Shopkeepers.
The old Nippon couple
My father knew as a child.
Starving
All the bad fishing seasons
Giving credit
To broken fisherman.
Never took a penny
He stood
At attention next to the door of Mr. and Mrs. Hiroshima
Until
They were gone.
Then he turned and knocked
Shoved his rifle thru the door
--Here,
Guard yourselves--
He said and walked away;
My Uncle Eddy told me
He saw
His brother
Rip the jacket from his chest and throw it in the bay.

My father was a War Hero
In his own way.

M.F. Nagel was born in anchorage Alaska. Her Athabaskan and Eyak heritage gave her a love of poetry. M.F. now lives and writes near the banks of the Matanuska river in the Palmer Butte, Alaska, where the moose, wild dog-roses and salmonberries provide unending joy and inspiration. 

ENCIRCLING LOOM

by James Grabill

Amniotic drops of prehistoric dew on the canyon rim walls luminesce with light in the brain.

Complex otherness floats in womb-pulse swaths crossing the Pacific in adaptations of bodily cells.

Under blinding stars, electrical ancestral stories pour down through the small houses of losses and gain, where future scarcity looms and a dark-violet eyelash carries more weight than we know.

As the road goes out on its own, the root in a seed will decide. Where daylight drives the atmosphere, a shirtless boy swims in the sea of air. The cradle collides with shadow and magnetic lineage in current encircling turns.

As overflow sleep expands and contacts in the spectrum, the unfinished complex mind has an eye for complexity in the world.

Isn’t this where separation from the whole grew opposable thumbs and set off on the road coming back?

What part of the whole would being exclude? What animals haven’t loved and feared this air?


James Grabill’s poems have appeared in numerous periodicals such as Stand (UK), Magma (UK), Toronto Quarterly (CAN), Harvard Review (US), Terrain (US), Seneca Review (US), Urthona (UK), kayak (US), Plumwood Mountain (AUS), Caliban (US), Spittoon (US), Weber: The Contemporary West (US), The Common Review (US), and The Buddhist Poetry Review (US). His books of poems include Poem Rising Out of the Earth and Standing Up in Someone and An Indigo Scent after the Rain. He lives in Oregon, where he teaches 'systems thinking' relative to sustainability.

DST

by  Gerard Sarnat

Image © Sheri Zimmerlin. You are welcome to copy for non-profit use.

4:57, first dusk since Daylight Savings Time lapsed,
we live on

the shore of the Pacific’s rim.
Fibrillating bloody yolk broken,

orangetemple shapeshift greenflash goldenbrownmuffin
done, I’m so happy

sharing this moment with a grandson
who says there are forty billion

habitable earths and at least one
has volcanos that spout chocolate.

Elliot gestures as a red-hot flotilla
of crockodilios

punctuated by wellfleets of pointillist ember prey
makes its way

across the horizon
only to disappears into a cloudbank

never to come out.  At the storm's
critical juncture, the boy wonders,

Why thunder has jagged zigzags
or is it the other thing -- and why?

Rose-colored polarized lenses
are the closest I get to worship.


Gerard Sarnat splits time between his San Francisco Bay Area forest home and Southern California's beaches. He is a seeker and Jewbu, married forty years/father of three/grandfather, physician to the disenfranchised, past CEO and Stanford professor, and virginal poet at the tender age of sixty-two. Gerry has recently been published or is forthcoming in Aha!Poetry, AscentAspirations, Atavar, AutumnLeaves, BathysphericReview, Bird&Moon, BlackZinnias, BlueJewYorker, ChicagoPoetry, CRITJournal, Defenestration, Etude, EZAAPP, Flutter, FurnaceReview, HissQuarterly, Jack, Juked, LanguageandCulture, LoudPoet, MyFavoriteBullet, NewWorksReview, Nthposition, OrigamiCondom, PensonFire, PoetsAgainstWar, Rambler, RiverWalkJournal, SlowTrains, SoMa, Spindle, StonetableReview, SubtleTea, SugarMule, ThePotomac, ThievesJargon, UndergroundVoices, UnlikelyStories, and WildernessHouseReview among others. Just Like the Jones', about his experience caring for Jonestown survivors, was solicited by JonestownAnnual Report and will appear later this year. He is currently working on an epic prose poem, The Homeless Chronicles. The California Institute of Arts and Letters' Pessoa Press will publish his first book. Gerry is a member of Poets and Writers, qualifying in both Creative Nonfiction and Poetry.