While the Sun Shines
They are raking the empty beach at Kill Devil Hills with a John-Deere tractor, and the memories of yesterday’s sunny delights, a thousand beach umbrellas, semi-nude sunbathers, and sand castles have all been erased. A cluster of early-birds are stopped cold by the virginal look of the beach, so smooth and ribboned, and seem to wonder if they are allowed to disrupt the flat-ironed sand that stretches now like aisles of vacuumed carpet or the stubble once the hay’s been baled.
Bird Scenes
A white ash in the park was filled with black starlings. Then a bright red cardinal sailed by, and a robin and a ruddy house finch, all partly red, and a wren. The Audubon Field Guide lists warblers and juncos, nuthatches, titmice, and chickadees, but there were none to be found around here. Blackbirds or bluejays, fangs out, were mobbing the slow moving crows in a dogfight while mocking black grackles foretold Brueghel’s winter hunters limping home empty-handed from the hunt.
- © Charles D. Tarlton 2021
Charles D. Tarlton lives and writes on the shore in Old Saybrook, Connecticut with his wife, Ann Knickerbocker, an abstract painter, and Nikki, their black female, standard poodle.
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