I didn’t realize how long it has been since I’ve been birding, but I knew I desperately wanted to get out there again. So, despite the fact that I knew birding would be slow, we went out to Theler Wetlands last week. Of course, the tide didn’t really cooperate with us since it was low tide when we began our walk.
We didn’t see many birds, but I definitely enjoyed even seeing familiar birds, like this Killdeer eating an amazingly long worm-like creature.
It must have been breakfast time for the birds because a small flock of Mergansers were repeatedly diving in one spot and several came up with bottom fish.
Although I’d hoped to see more shorebirds , we did see a small flock of Western Sandpipers back and forth, stopping to feed on the shore.
This Black-Capped Chickadee was so busy feeding that it didn’t even bother to glance at me.
Only this Song Sparrow paused eating long enough to greet us.
Mike Robinson introduced me to Kevin Miller way back in 2006. I’ve written about him a couple of times, but I just finished Vanish, his latest work, which is, as it turns out, already four years old. The work begins with a quote from Theodore Roethke, “What falls away is always. And is near.” The Past falls away, but it is always near, and many of these poems seem devoted to those who have passed away and to recovering memories of them and to death itself.
“Field Work” seems to tie in directly with the Roethke quote that begins the work.
Field Work
The five-year-old grandson carries the short shovel, says, I am a worker. His hands pulse red in the cold, and he pounds at the earth proud to turn soil. He has no notion Of entering the house where brothers read and play cars. This one will bury me, his brother will know what to say, the third will keep mischief alive. The girl child from another city will stand with the boys, her song long on tradition steeped in rain. When I threw dirt on my father's box, showers softened the knock of rocks on its pine door. The windows in the house of the dead have no glass, the music their lives make lifts curtains. The far field knows no distance.
Roethke’s last volume of poetry was entitled The Far Field and was published in 1964, the year of his death (and the year I was signed up for his class). It’s a fairly long poem, but these short excerpts seem to refer directly to the last line of Field Work.
I learned not to fear infinity, The far field, the windy cliffs of forever, The dying of time in the white light of tomorrow, The wheel turning away from itself, The sprawl of the wave, The on-coming water.
…
I am renewed by death, thought of my death, The dry scent of a dying garden in September, The wind fanning the ash of a low fire. What I love is near at hand, Always, in earth and air.
I’ll have to admit I’ve never thought of my dead father while playing with my grandchildren or great-grandchildren, but it’s certainly a connection we all consider, particularly as we age. At 83, I like to think my father lives on in me, and I hope that part of me will live on in my grandchildren when I’m gone.
In Vanish, Miller constantly reminds us of life’s ups and downs and the memories that live with us long after those ups and downs have passed.
In my quest to catch up on my reading, I just finished Sally Zakariya’s The Unknowable Mystery of Other People, another short book of poems published by The Poetry Box, which also published Liz Nakazawa’s Painting the Heart Open. Though it’s a little longer than Nakazawa’s book, it still only contains 29 poems.
Luckily, many of those 29 poems are quite moving, none more so (at least for me) than Treavor Times Three, an opening sequence of three poems about a disabled veteran who stands on a corner asking for donations. We learn a lot about Treavor in these three short poems, and a lot about ourselves. My favorite poem is the second section:
2 Change for a Funeral
No black man's gonna bury my momma, Trevor says, that's what she told me, only she used a different word. He’s talking about the Appalachian woman who shared his spot and how her family turned its back on her — didn’t even visit when she lay dying in the hospital. I went there every day-she was my friend. He looks down. Folks give me change, he says, and I save it up in those big water jugs.
Years of nickels, dimes, and quarters enough to pay for his friend's funeral, enough to see her safely in the ground, see her safely in the hands of the Lord.
Her daughter didn't care. She’s got six kids, all Bible names — some Christian.
The light goes green. We hand Treavor a few dollars and wish him a good day. We drive on, wondering if we’ve really done our Christian best.
This poem confronts us, confronts our values and beliefs from the very beginning, makes us feel the same way I often do when confronted by someone begging right after I’ve had an expensive dinner out. How ironic that the Appalachian woman begging on the corner still looks down upon blacks, though perhaps not as ironic as that her own family looks down upon her, apparently rejecting her because she’s standing on a corner begging. Prejudice apparently begets prejudice.
In startling contrast to the woman’s prejudice against blacks is Treavor’s revelation that he paid for the woman’s funeral with “years of nickels, dimes, and quarters when her own family rejected her, fulfilling the Marine motto of no man left behind. The reader is forced to confront their own prejudice that the homeless are only concerned with self-survival.
The poem also raises the question of what it means to be a Christian. Treavor wants to see “her safely in the hands of the Lord,” and can’t understand why the daughter, whose kids all have Bible Names, would ignore her as she lay dying.
In the end, even the narrator wonders if she has truly done her best as a Christian by giving Treavor a few dollars. The readers, like the speaker, are left unsettled — aware that quick acts of charity may not equal genuine love or justice.
I’ll have to admit that I thought the author’s interaction with Treavor, as discussed in all three poems, was fictional. That doesn’t seem to be the case, though, as there is a link to Falls Church Values Veterans, which Treavor helped to found.
I liked Zakariya’s book so much that I went to Amazon and downloaded another of her works. Alternatively, you can find her blog here
If I hadn’t been retired from teaching for 17 years, I’d present this poem to my class. It encourages students to examine their stereotypes and fosters empathy for others.
Of course, it’s one thing to question whether we are doing enough for others, but it’s much harder to live up to the biblical standards suggested in this song by Bruce Cockburn.
I had a hard time figuring out what I was trying to say about “Albatross,” my previous entry. It took me so long to write that I almost abandoned it, and I wasn’t entirely satisfied with what I ended up posting.
Out of curiosity, I asked ChatGPT to analyze the poem. I typed “analyze” and then pasted the whole poem into the chat input field.
Here’s what I got back:
This is a strong and layered poem, rich with ecological, political, and ethical concerns. Let’s break it down:
Title: “Albatross”
The title references Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, where the albatross symbolizes guilt and burden. Here, it frames the poem as a meditation on collective responsibility for environmental exploitation.
Themes 1.Environmental destruction •Illegal sand mining in Cambodia devastates ecosystems, especially mangroves: “prop / and pencil roots become useless bleeding stumps.” •The body of the land is personified as being stripped to its marrow, suggesting violence against nature itself. 2.Colonial greed & exploitation •The unnamed “country” that is “hungry to expand her borders” evokes nations that import Cambodian sand (notably Singapore). •“So she sucks on the fat of another’s land” presents exploitation as vampiric and parasitic. 3.Illusion of progress •Reclamation projects build “unsinkable land,” “tower[s],” “floating garden[s],” and casinos, but the imagery turns surreal and grotesque: “a casino with a capsized boat.” •Progress here is both unstable and morally compromised. 4.Guilt & complicity •The speaker acknowledges their own role: “my shame / of standing on another’s land.” •The albatross metaphor suggests inherited guilt for benefiting, directly or indirectly, from this destruction.
Imagery & Symbolism •“Machines like ravenous knives” ? violent extraction, relentless appetite. •Mangroves’ roots as “bleeding stumps” ? ecological mutilation. •Iron and rust air ? pollution, suffocation, corrosion of life. •“Floating garden of imported flora” ? artificiality, displacement, and erasure of native ecosystems. •Albatross ? weight of guilt, moral burden carried by both the exploiters and those who witness without intervening.
Tone & Voice •Accusatory yet self-implicating: The “country” is condemned, but the speaker does not escape blame. •Elegiac: mourns the loss of mangroves and land. •Ironic: the paradox of destroying one ecosystem to build another “unsinkable land.”
Form •Free verse, no strict meter or rhyme, allowing urgency and sharp turns of imagery. •Enjambment drives the poem forward, mirroring the ceaseless dredging: “carve out tonne / after incessant tonne of sand.”
Overall Meaning
The poem critiques the greed-driven destruction of Cambodia’s natural environment through illegal sand mining, situating it within global capitalist expansion. It wrestles with guilt—both collective (nations that consume sand) and personal (the speaker’s complicity). The albatross becomes a metaphor for this inescapable weight of ecological and ethical responsibility.
Would you like me to also compare this poem to Coleridge’s albatross in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner to deepen the symbolic connection, or keep the analysis focused on the environmental context?
I’ve been exploring AI, and particularly ChatGPT, since they offered a free version on the Mac, but this is the first time I’ve ever posted a poem and asked for an analysis. I was surprised by the reply.
For instance, I knew that the albatross represented guilt and punishment, but I had forgotten that I knew that because I’d read Coleridge in college many, many years ago.
ChatGPT’s statement of the “Overall Meaning” seemed right on, explaining why I chose the poem to represent the book as a whole.
I might argue with some of the opinions, particularly the ones on “Form,” but overall, ChatGPT examined the poem in more detail than I did.
