Amie Whittemore
poetry
Amie Whittemore is the author of four poetry collections, most recently the chapbook Hesitation Waltz (Midwest Writing Center). She was the 2020-2021 Poet Laureate of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. Her poems have won multiple awards, including a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize, and her writing has appeared in Blackbird, Colorado Review, Terrain.org, Pleiades, and elsewhere.
The Starling and the Callery
In our classroom, a student holds
a phone above her head like a trophy
but she’s not looking for an angle
on herself but at the starlings—
she says birds—stuffing their beaks
with Callery pears, bead-sized, softened
by the freeze. Best they can do
on this snow-dazzled day.
Beautiful, she says, as she snaps
photo after photo, birds flitting
from branch to branch as if
finished with being witnessed.
They are stunning—purple-black,
gold-speckled, fluffed up
against the cold. I don’t tell her
how they’re hated by farmers
for their appetite and numbers,
by birders who prefer indigenous species.
I don’t tell the student about the pears,
another blight, nor how starlings
are largely responsible for their dispersal:
bird and pear two forces propelling
each other, teammates high-fiving
as they rewrite the American landscape.
I just agree—yes, they’re lovely.
I’m tired of looking
under every lid to find a festering fact,
so I just say, they’re starlings, and hope
she keeps the word, returns to it
so the birds return to her—a pitch
on which seeds of light hitch, tiny and persistent.
Listen: