Alighting

Kathryn Jones

May 4, 2022

My sanctuary is a land of juniper-oak woodlands,

home of cardinals, chickadees, woodpeckers,

titmouse, wrens, crows, juncos. Each morning

they chirp and squawk, beseeching me 

to fill feeders with black oil sunflower seeds, 

the rock pond with water. Birds flutter down 

like angels of a greater god. I feed them and 

they feed me. They take refuge, here. 

Endangered Golden-cheeked Warblers arrive

each spring, flashing their bright yellow faces. 

They fly over mountains, migrate free of borders,

settle in this pocket of Texas, the only place

on Earth where they nest. Tiny beaks weave

strips of cedar bark with spider webs for cradles,

lay three or four eggs, one clutch a season. 

Instinct makes a stand against extinction.

This sanctuary was theirs long before I came.

How did we, different species of the same universe, 

choose this place to alight? I watch warblers flit

between live oak branches, pecking at insects 

hidden in lichens. They dip their beaks in water,

gold cheeks glowing against gray rock, then fly

back into the woods. I cannot touch them, but I feel

their wild hearts beating. I take refuge, there.

Kathryn Jones is a journalist, essayist, author, and poet. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Texas Monthly, and in the anthologies A Uniquely American Epic: Intimacy and Action, Tenderness and Action in Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (University Press of Kentucky, 2019) and Pickers and Poets: The Ruthlessly Poetic Singer-Songwriters of Texas (Texas A&M University Press, 2016). Her poetry has been published on tejacovido.com, in the Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas, and in the upcoming Odes and Elegies: Eco-Poetry from the Texas Gulf Coast (Lamar University Press). She is finishing a biography of Ben Johnson, the Academy Award-winning actor and world champion rodeo cowboy, to be published by the University Press of Mississippi. She was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters in 2016.