Patricia Hooper: “Feeder”
FEEDER
Under the feeder two mourning doves
gather for the cast-off seeds
a cardinal or squirrel has shaken down.
Some mornings I sit here on the deck
under the sugar maples,
the sky only a scrap of blue fabric
left from my grandmother’s apron,
and I eat cereal from the glass bowl
she filled with milk and oatmeal for her breakfast,
and afterward I wash the bowl and spoon
somebody else can use.
Patricia Hooper has had poems appear in Kenyon Review, Poetry, Ploushares, The Atlantic, Sewanee Review, Southern Review, Yale Review, Gettysburg Review, Agni, and other magazines. A fifth book of poetry, Wild Persistence, was published in 2019 by the University of Tampa Press and received the Brockman-Campbell Award for Poetry.