Because we all want to write more poems.
Aunt Fran’s Bird Feeders
I grew up with bird feeders, brimming
With gray and black sunflower seeds,
Chunky peanut butter for jaunty squirrels,
Suet for birds who hung on wire holders.
Aunt Fran loved back yard flora and fauna
Including her three year old nephew, invited
To live along with her younger sister, Bernadette,
With Uncle Eddie in East Hartford Connecticut,
In a Cape Cod house built after the war;
Welcoming back soldiers and sailors with
Unfinished attics and three foot crawl spaces
For consummate handymen’s skills
Brought to bear with upstairs bedrooms,
Basement workshops with shelves for
Canning the taste of summer in jars.
Perhaps I am the child Fran never had,
A possibility never considered likely
Until this memory of birds and squirrels,
Raising robins who fell from the nest.
Fran wanted her sister Charlotte
To join this familial mix, escape from
Eddie Wlodyka, the Polish narcissist,
In a continuous line from his father on
And on to the old country, where Poland’s
Endless decline was someone else’s fault.
He worked in the ship yards during the war
And wasted away of asbestosis in his mid 70s.
But Charlotte’s escape was into half gallons
Of red Gallo wine on the top shelf of
The refrigerator ready all day every day.
- Clayton Medeiros's Shared Poems
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