“The Hole-Nesters” by Leigha Comer
Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read “The Hole-Nesters” by Leigha Comer.
The Hole-Nesters
By Leigha Comer
Every swallow that flits past
Clips away a little part of me
And brings it gliding over
Muddy, yellowed fields
That are just barely crowning
Out of the afterbirth of spring,
Sodden and not so much bloody
As they are
A shaky, wet breath.
Strapped as I am
To my chair,
Bolstered by wheels
But still slow,
Fathomable,
Grounded,
Every near hit as they
Plummet towards the earth
Arrests me
Such that I’m not drilled
Further into the ground
But rather forced
To catch my breath
As one saw-wing
Loops forward in an aerial tumble
That spells out latitude
Across the sky.
It’s when I grip my wheels
And start to push myself
Out of the earth
And onto the pavement
That their acrobatics
Become fiercer still,
Dynamic,
Executing long strings of inversions
That nearly interrupt
My ascent.
Their speed means
They’re almost
Impossible to photograph,
And I think to myself,
What a gift.
Copyright © Leigha Comer
Leigha Comer is a writer and sociologist at Western University, where she studies the messy borderlands of care and policy. She lives with her husband, their two children, and their puffball of a Persian cat, Finley, in southwestern Ontario. Leigha loves non-human animals—especially the scrappy ones—and all things conservation. Her first serious piece of writing was a novel-length fanfic she wrote at age twelve, and it’s been touch and go ever since.
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